Category: Net Neutrality

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.

Tim Wu, the protege of Larry Lessig who’s been on two or three different sides of the net neutrality debate depending on which way the wind is blowing in Washington, has written a very bizarre analysis of wireless networks proposing massive new regulations. In what is either the greatest coincidence in recorded history or a demonstration of the source of Wu’s funding, Skype has passed it on to the FCC and asked them to go crazy and regulate away all the innovation we’ve seen in cell phone networks in the last ten years.

Adam Thierer of The Progress & Freedom Foundation isn’t impressed with the Skype-Wu Axis of Authoritarianism:

The fundamental question raised by the Skype-Wu proposal is whether America will continue to allow competition in wireless network architectures and business models to see which systems and plans (a) consumers truly prefer and that also (b) allow carriers to recoup fixed capital costs while (c) expanding and innovating to meet future needs. The Skype-Wu proposal would foreclose such marketplace experimentation by essentially converting cellular networks into a sort of quasi-commons and forcing private network operators to provide network access or services on someone else’s terms. That someone else, of course, is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which will be tasked with devising rules and price regulations to ensure “fair and non-discriminatory” access / interconnection pricing.

In my opinion, when you get right down to it, this proposal is a declaration of surrender.

The key point is something I’ve said to Wu on several occasions: there is much more innovation taking place on wireless networks than on the Internet, which gives the lie to Net Neutrality claims that their regulatory scheme is pro-innovation. Wu wants to suppress the data by stifling wireless innovation, and Skype is happy to have parasitic access to any new market they can find.

A pox upon them both.

Paul Kaputska, the Google apologist who writes for GigaOm, puts on an amazing display of intellectual flexibility in denying the remarks made by one of Google’s top engineers yesterday. First a Google press release, then Kapustka’s own words:

“Some remarks from Vincent Dureau’s well-received speech at the Cable Europe Congress were quoted out of context in news reports,” said a Google spokesperson Friday. The further background explanation from Google is that Dureau was responding to a question and was trying to address a potential bottleneck Google does see, which they say exists between Google’s own content-delivery infrastructure and the cable set-top box in your home.

Google’s infrastructure scales just fine, they said, and there is no problem watching TV on the Web. Despite what you may have read.

Vincent Dureau was quoted accurately, he was addressing a real problem, and Reuters put the remarks in context:

Google instead offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks’ high-quality delivery of shows.

The issue is that OTA TV, cable, and satellite use a broadcast model – one stream per program – while Internet TV tends to use a unicast model, which is one stream per consumer. The unicast model is fine as long as Internet TV is limited to 100,000 people watching five-minute, low-def clips on YouTube, but if 20 million people want to watch Survivor on the Internet at the same time, it would collapse. That’s a mathematical fact.

So Google proposes to build direct links from their massive server complexes to the cable systems that bypass the Internet and conform to the more efficient broadcast model. AT&T is running into problems with its U-Verse system that indicate this is a real problem, not something drummed up by the enemies of freedom who want to censor Daily Kos in order to keep the Republican hegemon in power (or whatever the cheerleaders for net neutrality regulations are claiming today.)

Net neutrality is faith-based network engineering, and it’s encouraging to know that at least some of the engineers at Google haven’t drunk that particular Kool-Aid.

This is the technical equivalent of Micheal Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe as a politician accidentally telling the truth. Google is such a creature of public opinion now that too much truth can only harm its monopoly position, hence the backsliding by the PR department.

UPDATE: There are some very interesting comments at GigaOm on this fiasco, and the readers aren’t buying Kapustka’s Googlespin:

Vincent Dureau, the executive quoted, was just hired from OpenTV. He was the CTO there. I don’t think he was quoted out of context.
Omar Javaid on February 10th, 2007 at 12:41 PM

Dureau was right first time – ask any network engineer – he just got slapped for telling the truth.

The PR tried to change the discussion from “the net is broken for TV” to “our TV infrastructure is k3wl!” It may be, but that’s not what Dureau was talking about. It’s sad to see GigaOM buying the spin, and shilling for Google.
Paul M on February 11th, 2007 at 3:47 AM

when this story broke, I couldn’t help but think about all Google’s datacenters and fiber backhaul and exactly what their plans are – PBS’s Robert Cringely has one idea, which is that Google knows that the web’s infrastructure is headed for a bandwidth-crunch and is positioning itself as a caching gatekeeper – http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit20070119001510.html

in that case, certainly their position on net neutrality hasn’t reversed – it just looks like a smart business play – tie ISPs’ hands and then cash in on the infrastructure they’ve amassed
Thomas on February 11th, 2007 at 8:32 PM

Ahem.

Here’s a piece of earth-shaking news from the I told you so department:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – New Internet TV services such as Joost and YouTube may bring the global network to its knees, Internet companies said on Wednesday, adding they are already investing heavily just to keep data flowing.

Google, which acquired online video sharing site YouTube last year, said the Internet was not designed for TV.

It even issued a warning to companies that think they can start distributing mainstream TV shows and movies on a global scale at broadcast quality over the public Internet.

“The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect,” Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.

Google instead offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks’ high-quality delivery of shows.

Duh. Regularly scheduled broadcast TV is fine for the Internet because we have a cute trick called multicast that allows many people to get a single stream, but the proliferation of any time, any show services like YouTube will bring the net to its knees. And that, boys and girls, is why you want Net Neutrality to die in the cradle.

The Internet, you see, is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes each of which has a limited capacity. And once they’re full, they’re full. And you have to wait. Ted Stevens was right all along, and it’s about time that Google got around to noticing.

Linklove Mark Goldberg.

UPDATE: AT&T is learning the same lesson the hard way.