Category: Net Neutrality

I’m very happy to learn that the idiotic Snowe-Dorgan amendment to the telecom bill was defeated in committee. It was a close vote, but all Republicans except Snowe voted against and all Democrats voted with the Maine moron. There will undoubtedly be an attempt to re-introduce it as a floor amendment when the bill moves to the next stage, and we’ll hear the same tired old rhetoric about yesterday’s Internet seen the eyes of a bunch of Deadheads.

The Kosola Krowd is hoppin’ mad over losing once again, and I expect they’ll be on to a fresh round of vilifying Mike McCurry to demonstrate their deep understanding of the issues. Some are even hailing the loss as a victory.

Scott Cleland is happy:

“I am encouraged the Senate Commerce Committee rejected onerous net neutrality regulation of the Internet and also specifically protected Americans’ first amendment rights of free speech on the Internet,” Chairman Scott Cleland said today. “Those net neutrality proponents whose true agenda is to protect free speech on the Internet, and not price-regulate the Internet, should support Senator Stevens’ strong Internet First Amendment language on the Senate floor. Blocking final passage of the Stevens Bill would only ensure that net neutrality proponents achieve nothing in their quest for additional Internet safeguards,” Cleland added.

And he should be. The telecom bill has non-blocking rules, but not the flat service level Google wanted. That should be hailed as a victory all around.

And in related news, Sen. Ron Wyden (D, Google) is throwing a tantrum:

(Broadcasting & Cable) _ As the Senate prepares to take up video franchise/telecom reform in the Commerce Committee Tuesday, Senator Ron Wyden (R-Ore.) has threatened to put a hold on the bill if it is not strong enough on network neutrality.

Wyden’s been laughed off the Senate floor recently for his wild claim that Cox Cable blacklisted Craig’s List. I hear Senators are carrying copies of article debunking Wyden’s claim and sharing them. Google is building a massive complex right down I-84 from Portland, with the intent of cornering the market on Internet video downloads.

Wyden is just another politician protecting one of his state’s large employers from regulation.

UPDATE: Save the Internet, the astroturf lobbying front funded by Robert McChesney’s Free Press organization, publishes reactions from three consumer advocates disappointed that consumers might have some price flexibility in their Internet service plans. With advocates like these, who needs enemies?

Mike at Techdirt asks the question of the day: Why Is There So Little Honesty In The Net Neutrality Debate?

Looking the array of interests assembled under the neutrality banner, it’s not surprising:

A. The end-to-end cargo cult, a group of people who understand virtually nothing about how the Internet is put together, but who nevertheless make their living explaining its implications. David Isenberg, David Weinberger, and friends.

B. Big Content companies who want free rein over facilities bought and paid for with other people’s money. Google, Yahoo, Skype, et. al.

C. Political bloggers desperate to win a significant victory in order to get their consulting rates up: Kos, Armstrong, Stoller, Kelly.

D. Bewildered PACs afraid changes in the network will reduce its effectiveness as the ATM for fringe causes: Christian Coalition, Moveon.org, and their ilk.

The only real potential source of understanding comes from Big Content because the others have no more than a pedestrian understanding of the issues (if that) and Big Content has no incentive to tell the truth.

The Telcos have been sticking much closer to the facts than the forces on the other side.

The bogus “net neutrality” debate comes down to one fundamental question: are we going to allow the Internet to adapt to the needs of the future or are we going to strangle it according to the design of the past?

The Internet is under stress by new delay-sensitive applications such as telephony and streaming video and new protocols such as BitTorrent that suck up all available bandwidth and cause delay for other applications. The old TCP-based congestion model doesn’t work any more, and people expect better QoS for their phone calls than they can reasonably hope to get on a network dominated by BitTorrent traffic. And the business model for the wholesale Internet has never been right.

The net neutrality sycophants with their hippie fixation on the past are the real barrier to technical progress for the Net.

It should be easy for policy-makers to simply dismiss any group that claims “new laws pending in Congress permit your ISP to censor web sites.” That charge is so far from reality it doesn’t warrant a serious response.

I’d like to draw your attention to a very disturbing video. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide Web of Computer Internetting, has apparently been captured by terrorists. I say this because the Net Neutrality video clip (proprietary format only, Linux need not apply) on his MIT blog looks like one of those “captured soldier recants” kind of things we occasionally get from the war zones. He’s reading a script, his eyes are flying around wildly, and there seems to be a distinct lack of conviction in his voice. More than anything, it reminds me of little Elian Gonzalez denouncing his father before they were reunited and returned to Cuba.

Can we collect some money and pay the ransom for Sir Tim before he’s tortured again? Web 3.0 won’t be possible without his invaluable contribution.

Power to the people, dude.

Cory Doctorow has been one the few honest left-wing voices on Internet regulation, arguing that that willy-nilly regulation isn’t a reasonable approach to the alleged problem that Save the Internet and other Google sycophants aim to solve. He’s bent over backwards in recent article to appease them, burying the lede in the middle of the second of three pages on how to regulate the all-singing, all-dancing wonder principle:

1. Define network neutrality. This is harder than it sounds. If a Bell lets Akamai put one of its mirror servers in a central office, then Akamai’s customers can get a better quality of service to the Bell’s customers than those using an Akamai competitor. This is arguably a violation of net neutrality, but how do you solve it? It’s probably not practical to require the Bells to let all comers put local caches on their premises; there’s only so much rack space, after all.

Another tricky case: the University that provides a DSL service to its near-to-campus housing and configures its network to deliver guaranteed throughput to a courseware archive. It gets even stickier if the DSL and/or the courseware archive are supplied by commercial third parties. Poorly written net neutrality regulations could prevent universities from providing those services, which should be allowed.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine a Bell that came up with a plan to let services tune their applications to improve on throughput to its customers. For example, some Bells might be able to tune service more efficiently by providing real-time feedback to companies about the optimal frame size for its network, or information on traversing its internal private networks, and so on. This is a good way to wring performance out of lines and switches, but the efficiencies decay if the Bell is legally required to provide this service to every customer, without being compensated for the additional effort.

The sycophants are cheering Doctorow for coming over to their side, but like Tim Berners-Lee he doesn’t actually endorse their legislative program.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings wants to move his company’s video distribution system off the postal system and onto the Internet, where it would become a major consumer of bandwidth. He’s worried about traffic-sensitive pricing, so he invokes the all-singing, all-dancing Wonder Principle, “net neutrality”, on the opinion pages of America’s most credulous newspaper:

Today, forces are at work to stake out future control of Web site traffic and eliminate the Internet’s longstanding openness. Cable and phone companies are currently working on Capitol Hill to protect their ability to discriminate in the delivery or prioritization of Internet content based on its source or ownership. The giant cable and phone companies don’t want Congress to limit their power to discriminate against Web sites. They want to be able to pick and choose the Internet content that travels via high-speed broadband.

This sounds really great, but it unfortunately fails to acknowledge that the Internet is a mesh of financial agreements among broadband carriers which delivers different levels of service to different customers. Invoking the image of a network that never was to block progress in network engineering is a fundamentally self-serving, dishonest ploy.

Netflix uses a transport system that offers different levels of service to customers with different needs, the US Postal Service. While I can sympathize with Mr. Hastings’ desire to have Fedex service for the price of a first class stamp, I’d rather not be the one to pay the difference.

Got an opinion about Google’s “net neutrality” regulations? It could be worth money to you, as it has been to Legal Fiction’s Publius:

To avoid any future Armando situations, I should disclose that I am currently working on behalf of pro-net neutrality clients. At the time I wrote about net neutrality, I wasn’t. But now I am. So I’m probably going to stay away from it altogether on the blog, which is unfortunate because I have better things to say now. But anyway – take it for what it’s worth.

How many bloggers have been paid to spin this issue? I’m already aware of Tim Karr and have my suspicions about Jerome Armstrong’s boy Matt Stoller as well as a few others, so we’ll have to see. (note: this paragraph revised because I don’t want to get sued by one of the unemployed lawyers in the Kosola Krowd).

UPDATE: Stoller claims nobody’s paying him to spin the fables he’s spun about Cox Cable and others. Which is worse, spreading a pack of lies for the fun of it, or doing it because you’ve been paid? It’s reasonably clear that the Armstrong/Kos Krowd is in this fight because they’re relentlessly searching for an issue they can win. All their candidates have lost, so how best to hang on the illusion of influence they’re trying to create than by getting behind an issue that taps into the emotional echo-chamber that is the blogosphere? As Stoller said at “Yearly Kos” he doesn’t understand the issue, he just wants to be on the winning side for a change.

Then again, it could be something to do with astrology.

A large group of exceptionally clueless souls got together recently and decided to bare their ignorance to the world, just in case anyone was in doubt. They engaged in the one of the great, time-honored practices of puffed-up egos everywhere and wrote an ersatz piece of “model legislation” dictating that anyone who doesn’t understand “The Internet” as they do is bad and wrong and can’t call his product “The Internet”.

Gosh, what would lawmakers do without such expert advice? Here’s their deep insight:

SEC. 3. DECEPTIVE PRACTICES IN PROVIDING INTERNET ACCESS.
(1) Definitions.- As used in this Section:
(A) Internet.- The term “Internet” means the worldwide, publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP), some characteristics of which include:
i) Transmissions between users who hold globally reachable addresses, and which transmissions are broken down into smaller segments referred to as “packets” comprised of a small portion of information useful to the users at each transmission’s endpoints, and a small set of prefixed data describing the source and destination of each transmission and how the packet is to be treated;
ii) routers that transmit these packets to various other routers on a best efforts basis, changing routers freely as a means of managing network flow; and
iii) said routers transmit packets independently of each other and independently of the particular application in use, in accordance with globally defined protocol requirements and recommendations.
(B) Internet access.- The term “Internet access” means a service that enables users to transmit and receive transmissions of data using the Internet protocol in a manner that is agnostic to the nature, source or destination of the transmission of any packet. Such IP transmissions may include information, text, sounds, images and other content such as messaging and electronic mail.
(2) Any person engaged in interstate commerce that charges a fee for the provision of Internet access must in fact provide access to the Internet in accord with the above definition, regardless whether additional proprietary content, information or other services are also provided as part of a package of services offered to consumers. [emphasis added for laughs]

That’s heavy, isn’t it? There are only about five blatant falsehoods and two obvious contradictions in it.

My favorites:

1. They act like the Internet is a network, and not simply a means of interconnecting networks. The Internet doesn’t actually care what you do on your private network, it only sees the things you pass to other networks.

2. They ignore the structure of the IP header, which includes a TOS field with several levels of priority.

3. They don’t understand the fact that routing depends on commercial contracts, the enforcement of which depends on examination of addresses and labels.

According to this exercise in intellectual masturbation there is no Internet today.

Some of the geniuses involved are:

Susan Crawford, Associate Professor of Law, Cardozo Law School (thinks the Internet is a telegraph)
Bob Frankston, Telecommunications Analyst and Visionary (actually, he’s the Visicalc guy)
David S. Isenberg, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, isen.com, LLC (fired from the phone company and mad about it)
Kevin Marks, mediAgora (has a very thick English accent but no knowledge of network architecture)
Andy Oram, Editor, O’Reilly Media (O’Reilly)
David P. Reed, contributor to original Internet Protocol design (was in the same room with David Clark 30 years ago, on a downhill slide since)
Clay Shirky, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University (Journalist)
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University (wannabe Lessig)
Esme Vos, Founder, Muniwireless (lawyer)
David Weinberger, Fellow, Harvard Berkman Center (former philosophy professor)
Steve Wozniak, Co-Founder of Apple Computer, Inc., Member, National Academy of Engineers (and recently a high school Spanish teacher)

There are some others I’ve never heard of, with titles like “Librarian” and “TV Documentary Producer.”

So you’ve been warned.

Poor Old Bob Cringely tried to do an experiment with Bit Torrent and prioritized VoIP and forget to control a variable: the bandwidth consumed by the VoIP call whether it’s prioritized or not. Naturally, he jumped to some very stupid conclusions:

With this new knowledge I did a simple test that you can do, too…I did a couple BitTorrent downloads of specific files, measuring how much time and total bandwidth was required. Then I deleted those files, changed my Internet Gateway settings to give priority to my Vonage VoIP packets, called my Mom on the phone and started downloading the same two BitTorrent files…

My test results were clear. I had no problem downloading the same BitTorrent files, but it took longer. That was no surprise. After all, I WAS talking to my Mom, which would have taken some bandwidth away from BitTorrent. But the more interesting result was that the total bandwidth required to download the same files using traffic shaping versus not using traffic shaping was almost 20 percent more, which undoubtedly came down to increased BitTorrent overhead due to contention and retransmissions involving the priority VoIP service.

In other words, he downloaded some files while he wasn’t on the phone and then downloaded them again while he was and it took longer the second time. Duh, isn’t that what you would normally want?

Cringely also makes the startling discovery that Bit Torrent is very aggressive in its search for bandwidth, and warns that throttling it makes it take even more bandwidth. That sound like yet another flaw in Bit Torrent, and I don’t see why all VoIP users should stop making phone calls so Bit Torrent can run faster. His argument is along of the lines of “we better not make those terrorists mad by killing them.”

Is this guy on drugs?

Today’s editorial on Internet regulation in the LA Times is the best one yet from the MSM. They focus on traffic priorities, the key regulatory issue:

Cable operators already divide their wires into two sections: one for prioritized data, which is used for television and related services, and another for Internet access. As phone companies add capacity to their networks, they should be able to take a similar path.

This approach is also consistent with what Internet users expect when they sign up for broadband. Having paid a premium for better Internet access, they don’t want their broadband provider cutting deals that could put their favorite sites at the tail end of the pipe. Meanwhile, Web-based companies shouldn’t be forced to pay more just to continue delivering the experience they deliver today.

Unfortunately, that’s not the route taken by the House earlier this month when it passed a bill to make it easier for phone companies to offer cable TV-like services. The Senate Commerce Committee is about to take up an even less attractive alternative that would provide a weak guarantee of users’ rights but no protection for websites against discrimination by broadband providers.

That last paragraph is wrong, however. On today’s cable system, TV, telephone, and Internet all move in separate bands, where they don’t interfere with each other (the technique is “frequency-division multiplexing” or FDM). On a single-frequency fiber, this is accomplished by “time-division multiplexing” (TDM) which may be implemented in a couple of ways, one of which uses priorities to gain great efficiencies (this technique is central to the Internet’s transport system.) Congress doesn’t have the power to change this, but new technology can, if it’s really a good idea.

The regulations promoted by the Google-backed coalition can be read in such a way that TDM is illegal, and that would do great harm to everybody.

Google’s main concern is protection from transport fees, and eBay’s is protection of its Skype service from technically superior offerings using priorities. These special interests should not dominate future regulations, especially as they’ve been sold on a number of false premises.

The Internet is much less neutral than they claim, and killing priority traffic doesn’t “protect free speech”. Traffic management at this level is a question of milliseconds, something the typical web surfer is unlikely to notice.