Category: Networks

Doc Searls wants to know what you would do with a Gigabit fiber connection between your dwelling unit and the Internet. My answer: nothing I couldn’t do with Verizon’s standard 15 Mb/s connection. Am I missing some vital need that I have and don’t know about? Tons of bandwidth is cool until you get the bill for it, and paying for more than I need doesn’t seem all that smart to me.

Craig Newmark gets really irate when I point out that his net neutrality advocacy serves the interests of his corporate masters at eBay, owners of Skype. This story in Valleywag sheds some light on his sensitivity:

Everything you know about Craig Newmark is wrong. The tale that Craigslist’s founder and CEO Jim Buckmaster like to tell about how eBay got a stake in their company goes like this: Newmark, the clueless business naif, issued shares to an employee, never thinking they’d be cashed in. That employee turned around and sold the shares right under Newmark’s nose to rapacious auctions giant eBay back in 2004. It’s a good story. But it’s nothing like the truth, according to sources close to the transaction. And the truth? That Newmark and Buckmaster, who love to portray themselves as unpretentious types who care nothing for money, can be bought. For a mere $16 million.

So Newmark put 10 million eBucks in his bank account, and draws a breath-taking salary from Craig’s List today. He’s not exactly the well-meaning simpleton he’s supposed to be, is he?

Is it just me or is there an increase in net neutrality paranoia recently? The arguments are changing, but they’re still misguided and confused. In the Weinberger article, there’s a link to a new piece of Isenberg fantasy about how the Internet works. Isenberg wants to ban source- and destination-based network service:

the prohibition of, “any service that privileges, degrades or prioritizes any packet . . . based on its source, ownership or destination,”

…which would put all of our core networking suppliers out of business. That doesn’t strike me as a very good way to bring cheaper and faster broadband to America’s computer-lovers. If they love the Internet so much, why do they want to ban its basic operational principles?

The FCC has closed its comments period on the bogus net neutrality issue. I’d like to see them throw the comments in the trash because it’s an idiotic issue manufactured for nefarious reasons. I’ve been enraged by the network neutrality movement because it thrives on extreme misstatements of network engineering principles. I create network architectures and protocols for a living, so this is a subject matter that I’ve got cold. You’re probably using some technologies that I had a hand in designing, standardizing, and implementing when nobody else knew what they were: Ethernet over twisted-pair wiring, the WiFi MAC protocol, and elements of the TCP/IP stack.

So this post will be the first in a series to list some of the egregious errors of fact that have emerged around the net neutrality debate, in the interest of correcting some major misunderstandings.

Myth: Network bandwidth is abundant and free, or nearly free.

One argument that I’ve heard from several quarters goes like this:

Once the cables and routers are in place, the operational cost of the network is virtually nil, just the electricity and maybe a little labor to replace stuff that breaks. So it makes no difference if a user sends or receives a little bit of stuff or a lot of stuff, it’s all the same.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The assumption here is that our requirement for network bandwidth is constant, so it simply takes one build-out to satisfy us. You have to do nothing more than remember how you’ve personally used the Internet over the past several years to see how silly this is. Bandwidth is an elastic resource, but user demand for it always goes up. While it may have been sufficient some years ago for your network connection to handle a few e-mails, it soon because necessary for it to handle basic web pages, then graphics-intensive web pages, and then Skype, BitTorrent, and whatever’s to follow, such as Joost.

Fact: Demand for bandwidth always increases, so bandwidth is neither abundant nor cheap for long.

More to follow.

According to John Edwards, net neutrality is simply free speech. But actually, folks, as much as he may want to believe that, it’s not so. Right Side of Tech explains:

I mean come on we are talking about if communication companies can prioritize network traffic and if they can have a tiered pricing models. We are not talking about the blocking of blogs, and other free speech. Certainly there is some blocking going on of streaming media but this should be worked out by market forces. The issue here is we don’t have true market forces at play. Instead we have Telcos that are protected by layers of regulation. Yet the everyone feels that addional regulation will fix the issue. Regulation is not the solution to this issue. Instead regulation will only to serve to stifle innovation, lower availability and increase costs.

People have a right to speak their minds without interference by the government. If we’re to extend that right to machines, we need to protect them from needless government regulation, and you don’t accomplish that with needless government regulation. Show us a problem that can’t be resolved with existing law, and I’ll be the first to write a model bill to fix it.

Until then, no politician advocating Internet regulation gets my vote.

Check The Guardian today for Andrew Orlowski’s take on net neutrality as an Internet conspiracy theory:

In a much celebrated remark, a senior Bush administration aide told journalist Ron Suskind: “When we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” But with the democratisation of publishing, creating new realities is now a game that everyone can play. Conspiracy theorists have used the web to great effect, with a mini-industry insisting the 9/11 attacks were a US plot. Describing the popularity of such fantasy realities, Alexander Cockburn lamented that “outrage burns in many an American breast, but there’s scant outlet for it in the political arena”…

The UK’s most prominent internet engineer, Professor Jon Crowcroft of Cambridge University, thinks that activists had imagined a bogus demon. “Net Neutrality is a misdirection, a red herring,” he says.

Save The Internet took full advantage of rational fears, argues veteran internet engineer Richard Bennett, but in doing so, it created “an Intelligent Design for the Left”.

The gap between fear and reality is even more stark when the technical issues are examined. The Neutrality amendments rejected by Congress last year would have made many of today’s private contracts illegal, and outlawed the techniques such as “traffic shaping” that ISPs use to curb bandwidth hogs, says Bennett…

Even worse was the long-term chilling effect. Neutrality would have made designing a better internet much harder, says the man commonly described as the father of the internet.

Dr Robert Kahn says that Neutrality legislation poses a fundamental threat to internet research because it misunderstands what the internet really is; it’s a network of networks, and experimentation on private networks must be encouraged.”The internet has never been neutral,” explains Crowcroft. “Without traffic shaping, we won’t get the convergence that allows the innovation on TV and online games that we’ve seen in data and telephony.”

Last month the Neutrality bandwagon reached Westminster – where it was dismissed in short order. Summing up the consensus at the end of an eForum debate at Millbank, the former Trade Minister Alun Michael described Neutrality as “an answer to problems we don’t have, using a philosophy we don’t share.” And with an echo of Professors Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson, Michael said the phenomenon reminded him of the Tower of Babel.

When the ink is dry on this issue, historians will see it more as a testament to the power of the Internet to win support for dubious causes than anything else. To think that neutralitarians have actually built a movement to pressure Congress to enact laws against unprecedented, speculative, hypothetical ills is actually mind-boggling.

Don’t they have enough real problems?

This is good:

Network neutrality is a policy proposal that would regulate how network providers manage and price the use of their networks. Congress has introduced several bills on network neutrality. Proposed legislation generally would mandate that Internet service providers exercise no control over the content that flows over their lines and would bar providers from charging particular services more than others for preferentially faster access to the Internet. These proposals must be considered carefully in light of the underlying economics. Our basic concern is that most proposals aimed at implementing net neutrality are likely to do more harm than good.

Read the whole thing, it’s only three pages long.

The FCC has issued a “Notice of Inquiry” on net neutrality, a move that allows them to take comments on an issue in order to determine whether there’s any reason to consider new regulations. While you’d think net neutrality advocates would be happy about this, they’re anything but. This move calls their bluff, forcing them to produce real evidence of harm in the operation of the Internet, not just wild speculation and fantasy. Art Brodsky at Public Knowledge has a typical reaction:

“The Commission should recognize that the goal of Net Neutrality is to restore the protections for consumers and content providers that were in effect when the Internet started and which allowed the medium to become what it has today. Simply because telephone and cable companies are on their best behavior today, while the Commission and Congress examine the issue, is no reason to delay action to protect consumers and content providers in the future from the actions of network operators which have said they will split the Internet into a privileged fast lane, and a dirt road for everyone else. Waiting until the network operators have implemented those plans and then trying to regulate after the fact, as some have suggested, will not be effective in protecting consumers and protecting innovation. “

PK wants regulations because they sound good, not because they do good, and how dare the FCC collect data before enacting them!

The NN movement is unraveling as more of the Internet’s thought leaders come down on the “wait and see” side. Britain and Canada have rejected it, and one by one the states are passing video franchising laws without a trace of NN regulation. Microsoft has left the NN coalition, and Google is expressing public doubts about their position. So it’s becoming increasingly obvious that NN is a vanity campaign by a few old farts like Vint Cerf who fear advances in technology and some shrieking by “public interest” corporations who thrive on fear, uncertainty and doubt.

The FCC is doing exactly the right thing, slowing down the train and asking for the facts. And NN advocates know that course of action is deadly, because the one thing they can’t deliver is actual evidence of a problem.