CNet’s Daniel Terdiman tried to get inside Google’s new complex in Oregon, and was turned away. See what Ron Wyden’s defending.
UPDATE: One application that’s going to run in this hideaway is Google Checkout. See Donna Bogatin for discussion of Google’s impact on business relationships on the Web. She asks the right question:
Is Google a benevolent promoter of ecommerce, however, or is it an online “wolf in sheep’s clothing”?
There’s plenty of evidence pointing to the latter conclusion.
Behold the brilliance of Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), telco apologist and anti-net neutrality zealot:
This clown idiot dunce esteemed politician knows as much about the Internet as one of the crustaceans swimming around at Red Lobster. Only he has a little less charismatic of a personality.
Letting rockets scientists like Stevens guide the future of the Internet is like having Britney Spears and K-Fed babysit your newborn child. There’ll be lots of smoke and crying following all of the bad decisions.
I sent an Internet to him to complain.
And, Richard, you must so proud to have Ted on your side!
The strike-through markup didn’t work for “clown”, “idiot”, and “dunce” – so consider those redacted.
Yeah, having Alyssa Milano write your new Internet regulations is so much better.
Doug, you’re funny.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that lots of people in this debate don’t have a really good idea of what the Internet is, but picking on the politicans is like shooting future brides at a Filene’s Basement wedding gown sale.
The fact remains is that Stevens Bill gives you the freedom of speech and your god given right to publish crappy HTML and Flash animations will be protected. Which is good, and important.
It also doesn’t over reach and legally mandate the micro management of Internetwork protocol behavior or engineering decision.
Which is also good, and more important than you realize.
This is not a case of “picking on politicians” because many of then have a very good idea of what the Internet is. Despite his being swiftboated for it, Al Gore had a very good idea of what the Internet could be when he sponsored the legislation for Arpanet.
This is not something that Senator Stevens has suddenly become aware of, its a communications infrastructure that his congressional body enabled at its infancy. The fact that he is laughably flatfooted on it rests right at his own front door.
He’s too busy taking money from the telcos to even ask the right questions or go through the legislative history right there in the Senate.
Arpanet in it’s infancy bared little or no resemblance to todays modern Internet. BGP v4 didn’t exist at the time, Hell EGP didn’t exist at the time. Hell, when Al Gore decided to vote for the project, TCP/IP wasn’t even running on the damn thing.
I believe Sen. Stevens understands that you can’t regulate network engineering. If they applied these sorts of lame NN regulations on Arpanet would still be running NCP.
comparing ARPAnet with today’s internet is like comparing a VW Bug and a 747.
They both are transportation systems, just like webpages and voip are just packets.
Right?
“They both are transportation systems, just like webpages and voip are just packets.”
Yeah, those BitTorrent packets deserve rights too :). We shouldn’t be violating their civil rights now should we? The DPSProject jokers want to “just prioritize the small packets”. I guess they haven’t figured out that BitTorrent uses big and small packets, mostly small. You’ve got these people that think it’s their right to shove 28 mbps HDV streams on the Net. I say let them, so long as they’re “best effort” service and let them fill in the valleys in bandwidth usage and let those tiny 89 kbps critical VoIP streams go first. Sure it would be nice to have QoS for free, and more bandwidth for free would be nice too. Oh and some Sweetish bikini team members would be nice too. But most of us have learned that there is no Santa Claus and you have to pay for these things.
George, you have to pay for the Sweed’s Bikini Team? DARN! I was hoping net neutrality would make the Swedes realize we’re actually Socialists and send them over free of charge….
I listened to Stevens’ lame attempts including his “5 day old email” quotes, so I’m not convinced he even has half a clue. I don’t think he’d know an RJ45 if it was up his…well.. you know.
Its generally acknowledged that Arpanet was the basis of the modern internet. Its name even persists in the way we handle reverse DNS.
I tend to view the DPS Project as the injection of at least some clue into the debate, but there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of network operations that is presented as fact:
From the DSP literature:
Here they assume that Network operators are willy nilly going to pick and chose which protocols deserve what service, when they’re more likely to leave that up to the customers who ask for it. Operators typically only prioritize control, security and mangement protocols, because without those the network is unmanagable. For other applications, prioritization is customer driven: A customer asks for prioritization and pays for it.
The status quo insures that ISPs aren’t second guessing application development, and prevents users for asking for things they don’t need given the price constraints.
For Example:
Low latency queueing for FTP is swell, but is it worth the premium when it’s not necessary?
A factoid that has as much relevancy to today’s Internet as telegraphs do to AT&T’s optical network.
Why? Because its evolution wasn’t shackled by the preconcieved notions of poltiticians or users.
If the NN model being proposed today by the “Save Teh Innerweb” crowd was adopted in the Internet’s infancy, BGP would have been a political non-starter because it alows network operators to “discriminate.”
That’s why the comparision between Arpanet and the Internet in the NN debate is suspect. Anyone who has had time to review the real gem of Arpanet, the large bodies of RFCs and the RFC process itself (which has been revised 3 times already), would understand this.
You’re absolutely right Max. Customer asks for prioritization and customer pays for it. Prioritization has to be done on a “whitelist” if it is to work at all. That whitelist is customer driven and customer tagged and they’re the ones who determine priority. But that priority whitelist can only be a small percentage of traffic, or else anyone and everyone will simply mark everything for priority delivery which means those who actually play by the rules get harmed. The idea that you can’t look at the source and destination is stupid, because it makes it impossible to make contractual agreements.
The idea that you can figure out what something is by looking at the packet is obsolete since a lot of things like Skype can tunnel over HTTP. BitTorrent uses mostly small packets on their slower streams and it uses LOTS of them to achieve a decent aggregate throughput. These DPSProject people saying “just prioritize the little packets” is nuts. They really don’t want any priority unless they can get a cut of it for free.
When I debated Tim Karr (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=259), I pinned his position down. I asked him “so your position is that everyone gets QoS or no one gets QoS”. His answer was “basically, yes”. He had tried earlier to answer the question by saying, I don’t want any discrimination. Well that is one perverted definition of discrimination. Discrimination on the Internet is when you say: I don’t like black, Asian, Latino people so I’m going to charge them double for the same amount of prioritization. Saying you’re going to give a little priority to paying customers is about as fair, logical, and reasonable as it gets.
I don’t think they have a firm grasp on the underlying technology. Alas, most Telco executives probably don’t either. =)
It makes for some very frustrating discussions with people who don’t have operational network management experience, imagine the fun discussions that go on everyday between Telco managment and Engineers.
Manager:”So can we block this google thing?”
Engineer: “I use this google thing…. and the NOC will have your head soon as they figure out that your responsible for the deluge of angy calls.”
Manager: “Can’t we offer QoS to the highest bidder, you know make MSN load faster than Yahoo?”
Engineer: “Hmm, Yeah most people probably won’t notice. Their browsers cache stuff. Don’t really see what MSN gets out of the deal.” “Besides, Akamai has a cache farm on net… you want to go tell their account rep that your going to “impair” delivery of one of their customers?”
Manager “IPTV?”
Engineer: “A little de rigeur… I’ve got a better idea: Lets build a widget that lets the customer set aside a slice of bandwidth for priority handling… maybe an option to boost their upstream bandwidth for idle periods to get better Bittorrent throughput. We’ll build a control panel application to let them choose a list of apps or destinations that they would like to classify as high priority? Flat rate fee, cool application… heck, we could even run google ads on a stripped down ‘free’ version”
Manager: “Can’t we charge google wholesale QoS rates? It’s easier on billing if they can bill large accounts… They’ve been talking about that video project. QoS is good for that stuff right?”
Engineer: “That might fly, but our customers will probably be more interested in using the service for more, um, *personal* Content.”
Manager: “Blogs?”
Engineer: “Not quite…. probably more along the lines of HD interactive Pr0n, oh, and World of Warcraft..”
Manager: “Yeah, Marketing is going to have a hard time with that…”
Engineer: “Good point. Just tell marketing that it’s good for VOIP, they’ve been wanting us to come up with a solution for it’s reliablity shortcomings.” “Basically our enhanced service will allow our customers to call us on their VOIP phone to complain when they get infected when the next Microsoft worm that hijacks their internet connection.”
Manager: “Can you get it to support 95% billing?”
Engineer: Cries.
He-he. Nice one Max.
I don’t think one NN-advocate would object to the following scenario that would enable QoS through to the last-mile:
Consumer pays for prioritization of chosen content
If the customer so chooses, they could pay an upcharge to the carrier to get QoS on YouTube, or Vonage, or Skype. Cisco SEF appears perfectly capable of delivering QoS based upon destination IP.
Yes, I know, it’s a foreign concept for the carriers: putting the consumer in charge. And it’s therefore an idea that is certain to be ignored.
Most Enterprises have specified service level agreements with carriers as part of their contracts for years, so it’s not necessarily a foreign concept.
Markey and Snowe-Dorgan explicitly forbid “Consumer pays for prioritization of chosen content.”
Read the bills.