Category: Net Neutrality

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the highly-regarded hypertext guru who invented the web, is up to his old tricks again, sowing the seeds of paranoia by confusing service discrimination with content discrimination. He delivered some remarks before a web conference in Scotland that would have made any pandering politician proud:

Sir Tim said this was “not the internet model”. The “right” model, as exists at the moment, was that any content provider could pay for a connection to the internet and could then put any content on to the web with no discrimination.

Speaking to reporters in Edinburgh at the WWW2006 conference, he argued this was where the great benefit of the internet lay.

“You get this tremendous serendipity where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for,” he said.

A two-tier system would mean that people would only have full access to those portions of the internet that they paid for and that some companies would be given priority over others.

Berners-Lee knows better than this. He wrote on this own little blog that he’s not opposed to service-level discrimination on the Internet:

As I said above, I am happy that “We may pay for a higher or a lower quality of service. We may pay for a service which has the characteristics of being good for video, or quality audio.”

… but these latest remarks confuse the necessary engineering to make voice over the Internet practical on a large scale with content discrimination. His largest deception was to frame these new services in terms of the Web, when they’re really quite separate. The man’s either an idiot or a fraud.

Ethan Zuckerman plays the typical “what if” game that neutrinos like so much, and enhances it in his comments with one of the biggest lies ever told:

Right now, no major ISPs give preferential treatment to one type of traffic over another.

Lippard sets him straight:

Again, not true in the backbone world–Global Crossing, Level 3, AT&T, MCI, Qwest, and others offer products that use QoS and separate MPLS VPNs for certain types of traffic (and permit customers to do the same with their own traffic). At least one of the above-mentioned bills (HR5417) will classify backbone providers as broadband providers and make these products illegal or of questionable legality, which makes no sense.

as do I:

The cable company access lines carry voice, video, and packet traffic on different channels and with different QoS. The DOCSIS protocol that carries packet traffic on this network is isochronous, and it most certainly prioritizes based on QoS. The telco lines that carry DSL carry analog voice in a different FDM domain, and apply completely different rules to it. And it’s always been legal for any ISP to prioritize traffic any way he sees fit; common carrier rules didn’t address ISP filtering and forwarding. WiFi networks also prioritize based on QoS requirements through a little feature called 802.11e.

VoIP doesn’t inherently work well on a packet network, with first-come, first-served queuing when load is reasonably high. Providing priority queuing is the most efficient way to combine VoIP with the heavy demands for bandwidth that HDTV poses. Simply throwing bandwidth at this problem doesn’t solve it, and when the bandwidth has to be bought with somebody else’s dime, your solution is a non-starter.

Every net neutrality argument I’ve seen relies on spin and misinformation, and yours is no exception.

Some of these neutrinos are simply uninformed, but others are deliberately lying.

Droolin’ Jim Sensenbrenner, chairman the House Judiciary Committee, has joined hands with his Democratic buddy John Conyers to introduce a bill banning Quality of Service on the Internet. The bill, HR 5417, would make it illegal for an ISP to manage high-priority queues. They would be bound to treat any packet marked for low-jitter service the same, regardless of size or origin. That sort of thing defeats the whole purpose of QoS, which is to provide a quick-check lane on the Internet where shoppers with little baskets don’t have to wait behind an endless stream of other shoppers with cartloads of stuff.

With Republicans getting on the grandstand and moronic religious nuts joining up, things are looking bad for the evolving Internet. Google has created an advantage for itself by building an unregulated private network that places servers close to everybody, and if the Internet changes this advantage will be nullified for voice and video delivery. Unless we get our act together, these mobsters are going to win.

Did you know Google is Moveon.org’s biggest supporter? read The American Spectator:

Google has become the single largest private corporate underwriter of MoveOn. According to sources in the Democrat National Committee, MoveOn has received more than $1 million from Google and its lobbyists in Washington to create grassroots support for the Internet regulation legislation. Some of that money has gone to an online petition drive and a letter-writing campaign, but the majority of that money is being used to fund their activities against Republicans out in the states.

For example, MoveOn is said by one DNC source to have funneled at least $100,000 “Net Neutrality” money to its operations in Pennsylvania (where MoveOn is organizing against Sen. Rick Santorum). It has also sent funds to Florida, Ohio, and Missouri.

MoveOn is also using the funds to help Democrats, including House minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state. “A month ago, Representative Pelosi didn’t know what Net Neutrality was, then she heard that Google and other Silicon Valley firms wanted it. Now it’s one of her top issues. What Silicon Valley wants, Silicon Valley gets,” says a House Democrat leadership staffer.

Maybe it’s time for a little anti-trust action against Google.

Now here’s some good news:

Some of the largest hardware makers in the world, including 3M, Cisco Systems, Corning and Qualcomm, sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday firmly opposing new laws mandating Net neutrality–the concept that broadband providers must never favor some Web sites or Internet services over others.

That view directly conflicts with what many software and Internet companies have been saying for the last few months. Led by Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, those companies have been spending millions of dollars to lobby for stiff new laws prohibiting broadband providers from rolling out two-tier networks.

“It is premature to attempt to enact some sort of network neutrality principles into law now,” says the letter, which was signed by 34 companies and sent to House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. “Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules.”

Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue is pretty much what the so-called net neutrality thing is all about.

Has anybody shared the Good News with you?

Washington D.C. — Today, Christian Coalition of America announced its support for the effort to amend pending telecom legislation in Congress in order to prevent the large phone and cable companies from discriminating against web sites.

Roberta Combs, the President of Christian Coalition of America did not say: “God created the Innernets right after he done separated the light from the darkness so’s Adam could find Eve’s MySpace page and get the ball a-rolling. The minions of Satan are presently seeking to tear the Innernets asunder from its best-effort packet delivery and pervert it with multiple service levels. If one level was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for sinners like me and you.

The Innernets is a Intelligent Design designed by the Designer and the instrument that leads us to the Rapture, and they can’t be no messin’ with it. Satan’s phone companies, the people who brought us all those “Prince Albert in a can” calls, say the Innernets has to change, to grow, and to improve. That sounds like Darwinism to us, and we’re agin’ it. We don’t want no monkey business just like we don’t want no dancing and no drinking of the wine. If Jesus wanted us to do that sort of thing, he would have done it hisself. Hmmm, where was I? Hey, gimme that snake to handle.

Right, we’re right proud to join up with that there scrawny vegetarian, Moby, ’cause of Jonah and that, and the witch-girl from the WB and all the heathern homosexual agendists to give Lucifer’s phone company a big ole fashioned country ass-whoopin’. (Why do you think they call it “Lucent” anyhow?) Let no man say we’re not as “hip” as all them heatherns. Hallelujah!”

After issuing this statement, Mrs. Combs promptly went for a dip in the cement pond with the Clampetts and then headed off to Wal*Mart for a case of mayonnaise and some white bread to go with her baloney.

There are probably more QoS engineers per capita in Portland than any other place in the world. The local paper there gets the regulation issue:

While neutrality advocates can cite a few cases in which network providers have shut down access to sites of which they disapproved, the telecom companies correctly note that they don’t have a history of playing favorites with Web sites or users. They say they understand the Net’s culture of openness and recognize it would be bad business to violate it.

They point out that it’s costly to build a high-speed network. They ask why customers willing to pay a premium for high speeds and broad lanes — “throughput,” as the geeks say — shouldn’t be allowed to do so. On this point, the telecoms are right — as long as nobody else’s ability to use the network is diminished.

Congress is under pressure from both sides of the debate, but it should borrow the first principle of the medical profession: First, do no harm. Bad law, in this case, could be much worse than no law. And it’s not entirely clear yet what a good law would look like.

Against the embarrassingly wrong editorial in the Mercury News, the Oregonian is downright brilliant.

From the mountaintop, straight talk on Internet regulation:

Don’t kid yourself that the issue here is “censoring” the Web. The issue is Internet survival. AT&T talks about the coming Multimedia Explosion as new forms of video traffic rapidly overtake Web-surfing, file transfer and email as the prime users of backbone capacity. Literally, “net neutrality” would result in an increasingly unreliable Internet as more and more high-bandwidth applications contest for space on networks that nobody would have an incentive to expand.

The real issue is where will the big bucks come from to create an Internet capable of handling the services now envisioned, let alone those not yet dreamed up. BellSouth’s Chief Architect Henry Kafka told an audience in March that a typical broadband user today consumes about two gigabytes of data a month, at a network cost of $1. Once TV has gone high-definition and on-demand, a typical user will consume about 1,120 gigabytes a month at a cost of $560 (that’s in addition to the administrative, sales and service costs that today make up the lion’s share of the user’s bill). “Clearly that’s not what the average user is going to pay per month for their video service,” Mr. Kafka said. “That’s why we need help.”

Think back to the beginnings of radio and TV: Those business models would never have worked if consumers had had to foot the bill directly for programming. It’s clear today that giving consumers the kind of Internet that will support high-definition video and gaming will require the bill to be shared by companies with a stake in putting the new services in front of consumers.

Amen, brothers and sisters, and a tip of the hat to Turk for this fine link.

Today’s editorial in the San Jose Mercury News in favor of Internet regulation is a real belly-buster:

Network neutrality isn’t new. Its basic tenets — that all users can access all legal content on the Internet and that all content providers are treated the same on the network — have been in effect since the birth of the Internet through regulations governing the old telephone network. But a series of court decisions and a vote of the Federal Communications Commission last year have voided those rules. And that has opened the door for phone and cable companies, which control Internet access, to change the rules of the game.

Bzzztttt – wrong. Cable Internet access has never been covered by common carrier laws, only dial-up and DSL have. And who provides the better service? Lawmakers freed DSL of its disadvantage against cable a year ago. The Internet itself, the backbone network, has never, ever been covered by common carrier regulations, and it’s this very thing that the search and software monopolies seek to change.

Consider the nascent world of Internet video, which promises to be a free-for-all of ingenuity and creativity. With enough bandwidth, CNN, a public access channel or an amateur video producer could put up content for the entire Internet to enjoy. Scores of innovative start-ups are coming up with business models to exploit that creativity, by organizing the new content, making it searchable and delivering it effectively to millions of users.

This stands reality on its head again. Real-time video isn’t practical over Vint Cerf’s Internet because it was engineered for e-mail and downloads. The Internet needs to grow the ability to deliver multi-media streams with very low delay to support the next generation of applications. Net neutrality criminalizes this practice, and along with it most of the advances that have been made in network engineering since the Internet was turned on in 1983.

Outside the Bay Area, few lawmakers seem to understand that by not enacting network neutrality legislation, they’d be subverting the basic principles that have made the Internet into such a powerful force for economic growth. Perhaps, it’s because they’ve been worn down by armies of lobbyists from the telephone and cable industries.

What Bay Area lawmaker understands how the Internet works, the one who gave us the V-Chip or the ones who line their campaign coffers with contributions from the companies that gave us the Internet Bubble? Our politicians are like politicians everywhere, captives to a group of interests who have positions on issues the lawmakers and their staffs scarcely understand. The legislation that opens up rights of way for fiber to the home is sensible, practical, and good for America as a whole and the high tech community in particular.

Network neutrality would be nothing short of a disaster for all of us who create or use networks.

Check out the Lippard Blog on Misinformation in defense of net neutrality:

It is distressing to see net neutrality advocates continue to get basic facts wrong in defense of their poorly thought-out positions. If you don’t understand how the Internet works today (technologically, politically, and legally), then you are not in a position to be making proposals about how it should be regulated that are not going to have significant (and likely very bad) unintended consequences.

Indeed.