Category: Net Neutrality

The Personal Democracy Forum had a panel on net neutrality yesterday featuring notorious neut Susan Crawford, who displayed some remarkable flexibility according to this report by Michael Turk:

To the content, all I can say is there were some misstatements made by Chris and Steve, but on the whole, they made the better argument. They stuck to facts and the discussion rather than making outlandish claims about things that might happen, maybe, someday, possibly. That seemed to be Tim Karr’s specialty. When challenged to name (outside of the Canadian cases which are irrelevant due to a different legal structure, and the Madison River case) one instance of telcos blocking access to content, he stared at the audience and made not sound.

He chose instead to repeat the already discredited claim that net neutrality has been the law of the land. If 60% of broadband connections are provided by cable; and cable has never had to live by the law that applied to DSL lines; and that law was repealed (essentially) to provide a level playing field; and the cable companies have not, regardless of having no legal prohibition, done any of what the net neutrality proponents claim will happen; how can you make such an outlandish argument with a straight face?

Worse than Karr, however, was Susan Crawford. She has, on her blog, routinely raged against the FCC and giving them more power. She has routinely referred to them in the most vile ways and spoken out against their power to, for instance, enforce their puritanical belief systems about exposing a naked breast to the world.

Crawford, a law professor, wants the FCC to regulate network management systems and business models but not content. If this makes any sense to you, please enlighten me. Crawford is typically mentioned as one of the Big Three law professors pushing neutrality, alongside Wu and Lessig, and she seems pretty dim. On her blog she reveals massive ignorance about networking:

These are just bits we’re talking about. Making them into “service type” decides the question up front — they’re not services until the carrier decides to call them that.

…which kind of ignores the fact that some bits are in a hurry and others aren’t, hence the need for different traffic classes.

Get a podcast about the debate here. Unfortunately there’s no podcast of the actual debate.

Public Knowledge is a backer of the wacky “Save the Internet” campaign, and the following commentary by their leader Gigi Sohn is eye-opening. Sohn comments on the AP story below about Internet congestion from HDTV, totally distorting the facts:

I’m sorry to say that this latest rationale for discrimination doesn’t wash either. These fears (how ironic that the pro-NN forces are the ones accused of fear-mongering) are based on absurd assumptions about how people use the Internet — that people will start watching streaming video like they do regular TV — for 8 hours a day, or that, as the AP story states “everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time.” We know that this won’t happen any time soon, if ever. Also, and this should be no surprise, the telcos are not revealing how much it would really cost to provide the best solution to the problem — building a fatter pipe.

There’s no need to assume that people will be watching TV for 8 hours a day for HDTV to represent a significant increase over TV downloads on today’s Internet because the baseline is virtually zero. How much TV does anybody download today? And yes, even one hour of HDTV consumes more bandwidth than the the typical Internet user consumes in a week, and a single baseball game in HDTV is a million times larger than a web page. As for people downloading news at the same time, isn’t this exactly what will happen if the broadcasters and telcos don’t go to Internet multicast in real-time for broadcasting? The news doesn’t have much value hours later.

Indeed, Internet2’s Gary Bachula testified a few months ago that the best, and most cost-effective way to deal with any capacity issues is to make the pipe fatter. Internet2, which is the next-generation Internet available only at Universities and colleges, considered both a discrimination-based model and a 100 MG pipe model, and chose the latter. If telcos and cable companies are permitted to create a two-lane Internet w. tolls for access to the high-speed lane, they will have no incentive to build the fat pipe, because they would then lose the revenue from the high-speed lane.

Bachula’s testimony in probably the most misunderstood comment on QoS in recent memory. His experimental network doesn’t serve a consumer market. It’s built on an over-provisioned backbone and fat pipes to the offices of the professors and grad students who connect to it. His discovery is nothing new: an over-provisioned network doesn’t take much management. But out here in the real world were people pay for services and companies have to profit from providing them, we don’t have such luxury. Solving QoS by adding bandwidth is like improving your computer’s performance by adding memory, it only works until the next release of Windows and then you need more memory again. QoS is needed on large scale networks that operate in the normal and economic range of bandwidth.

In the short term, there are other non-discriminatory ways to deal with this so-called “choking” of the Internet. One way is to put a cap on he amount of data that a user gets for free, and then charge extra if that person uses more, like cellphone usage.

There really aren’t any “non-discriminatory ways” of managing a network, as any user who finds what he wants to do constrained by policy is going to feel victimized.

That’s the prediction of Forrester Research:

Many have called for the US government to mandate “network neutrality” that will ensure all Internet traffic is delivered equally, consumer choice is upheld, and Internet innovation is not stalled. But, it won’t happen in the next three to five years. Why? Because no problem exists today and legislating neutrality will not give consumers the best results. In five years, when rich content taxes networks and broadband adoption approaches saturation, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will take a more hands-on approach and intervene if a consumer’s access to content and service is being denied. In the meantime, operators should err on the side of limited prioritization and content owners should build priority delivery into carriage agreements.

I hope they’re right.

Nutria would do well to read and understand the facts of life:

In this sense, broadband is like old-fashioned telephone service, where there are always more lines leading from homes to the local switching station than there are going from the station out of the neighborhood. If everyone in a neighborhood picks up the phone at once, some calls won’t go through because there aren’t enough outgoing lines. But that rarely happens, so the system works.

On the broadband network, the over subscription means that one megabit-per-second connection to the Internet is enough to serve 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second, typical for low-end DSL. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

Of course, the carrier also needs to pay for the equipment that brings data from the Internet connection point to the subscriber, first through fiber-optic lines and then through DSL or cable.

Over-subscription doesn’t present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it’s not going to work.

“The plain truth is that today’s access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect,” according to Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications Inc.’s top lobbyist.

Over-subscription is the essence of packet-switching, boys and girls, and without it we have the good old telephone network. We don’t want that, do we?

Vint Cerf’s letter to Congress on COPE displays some remarkable arrogance:

The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has led to an explosion of offerings – from VOIP to 802.11x wi-fi to blogging – that might never have evolved had central control of the network been required by design.

Positively breath-taking.

But let’s give credit where it’s due: the Internet is huge, and its very existence has made the world a better place. We should thank all the thousands of engineers who’ve made it possible, as well as the business people, the academics, and the bureaucrats. Thanks to all of y’all.

But do we really have any way of knowing whether the Internet’s success is mainly a function of its design as opposed to some other factor such as its parentage and timing? I could certainly argue that the advent of the IBM PC in 1981 made some kind of world-wide packet network inevitable, and if it hadn’t been the Internet it would have been something similar such as an ISO or XNS network. The Internet was a better choice than ISO because it was relatively simple and much earlier. And the Internet was a better choice than XNS because it wasn’t tied to single vendor and the government practically forced the source code on people. So I’m not so sure about the architect’s claim that the architecture was more important than the implementation.

And what exactly did TCP/IP have to do with the invention of WiFi? I worked on the original MAC protocol for WiFi and I can tell that the Internet wasn’t on the minds of anyone I worked with on it. We were certainly glad to use WiFi to attach devices to the Internet later on, but we would have been just as happy to attach them to anything else. All that the Internet did for WiFi was cause it problems because the Internet is too primitive to allow roaming; it ties a computer address to a location and that’s that.

The central control thing is a big goof too. WiFi networks have central control big time, and so does the Internet, in a more surreptitious way. See RFC 2309 for more on that, or scroll down.

Cerf has convinced himself that his role in history was greater than it really was, and he’s dead set on ensuring that there won’t be a Cerf Jr. who takes the Internet to the next level.

It’s sad to see a once-good engineer stoop so low.