Category: Networks

One of the lamest forms of discourse is sliming your opponent as a stooge of capitalistic or other assumed-to-be-evil interests. Professors Farber, Katz, Yoo, and Faulhaber have been attacked as shills by Jeff Chester on account of their publishing a well-reasoned Op-Ed in the Washington Post opposing new Internet regulations:

Super cable monopoly Comcast hired UC Berkeley’s Katz in 2003 to produce research which placed the industry in favorable light. Comcast, of course, opposes network neutrality [I cover the role of Katz and other communications -academics-for -industry hire in my new book, btw]. Professor Yoo worked for the cable lobby NCTA last year to write a net neutrality study as well. Even Davd Farber should have disclosed he has spoken under the banner of the Verizon Foundation at Carnegie Mellon.

Note that Chester’s smear of Farber consists solely of the professor’s giving one of a series of lectures at his university sponsored by Verizon (UPDATE: Farber was not compensated for this lecture in any way. He frequently gives talks for no honorarium, even to Microsoft after testifying against them. Chester’s smear is asinine.)

Chester’s trick often works in a capitalist society because we’re awash in money and somebody’s always paying somebody else. Chester himself makes his living writing books and giving talks on the evils of capitalism, and apparently does pretty well at it. Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky are both multi-millionaires from that very same pursuit.

In the network neutrality debate, one could point out that Google employees give thousands of dollars to Moveon.org, a primary supporter of Save the Internet, or that the other primary supporter, Free Press, is financially supported by the Schuman Foundation headed by Bill Moyers, who’s paid $200,000 a year for this virtuous task. Moyers aired a program on PBS that was a naked advertisement for Free Press, and spoke at Free Press’ National Conference on Media Reform funded by multi-billionaire currency trader George Soros’ Open Society Institute. One might argue that Soros wants to weaken investigative journalism so he can engage in legally questionable currency raiding without restrictions, so he supports a cause that would erode the financial basis of real investigative journalism.

According to Jeff Chester’s analysis, that’s the only way to understand net neutrality: I’m following the money (and Speaking Truth to Power, dude!)

I don’t buy that, so I’ll have to follow the arguments and judge them on their merits.

Dave Farber, Michael Katz, Chris Yoo, and Gerald Faulhaber have a very concise and well-constructed Op-Ed in today’s WaPo on the downsides of net neutrality regulations:

The legislative proposals debated in the 109th Congress take a very different approach. They would impose far-reaching prohibitions affecting all broadband providers, regardless of whether they wielded monopoly power and without any analysis of whether the challenged practice actually harmed competition. If enacted, these proposals would threaten to restrict a wide range of innovative services without providing any compensating customer benefits.

Most of the people who’ve made substantial contributions to the Internet in the past are converging on this point of view: it’s harmful to make too many restrictions on the services the network provides to users and applications. Contrast this view, which is empirically provable, with the assertion on the other side that there are mystical and unprovable reasons to favor a dearth of network services. The evidence is all on the side of deregulation.

H/T to Verizon’s Policy Blog

Andrew Orlowski has some fun with the AT&T-Bell South merger:

In a decade, American consumers have seen the number of Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or Baby Bells, coalesce from six down to just three: the odd man out, Qwest, the RBOC which covers the sparsely populated Mountain states, is surely next on AT&T’s menu.

The extraordinary thing is that all this took place at a time in the wake of the fall out from the telecoms bubble. The Bells enjoyed little affection from the public in any case, long before Global Crossing and MCI. and with an unpopular Republican President, Democrats can have been expected to push a few populist buttons, and hear some bells.

What actually happened is that Whitacre got everything he wanted, but only thanks to the aid of The Democratic Party, most of whom aren’t aware how thoroughly they’ve been outwitted.

Now that’s style.

It’s certainly an interesting perspective. I’ve observed that AT&T played a game of misdirection last year in a more concrete way. While activists focused on video franchising and net neutrality in Washington, the phone company quietly got statewide franchising from the big state legislatures in California, New Jersey, and Michigan without much fanfare. That’s playing the system.

The fact that states can’t impose net neutrality obligations even if they want to is not small thing, either.

Google’s one patent on network Quality of Service, US Patent #7142536, isn’t very neutral:

The present invention provides efficient and effective quality of service for information that is time sensitive (e.g., real time data)…In one embodiment of the present invention time sensitive information is cut through routed on a virtual channel and pre-empts non time sensitive information. In one embodiment a communication path probe is cut through routed via intermediate network devices to establish a communication path before other information is communicated from a originating source to a final destination…

It’s also pretty incoherent as it doesn’t appear to work in any of the presented embodiments; dropping TCP packets because they’re too old doesn’t accomplish anything but a retransmission.

This neut debate is interesting, featuring Tod Cohen, George Gilder, Peter Huber, Lawrence Lessig, Paul McWilliams, and Andy Kessler at Gilder’s Telecosm Conference.

Lessig really stands out – he sounds like a twelve-year-old girl demanding an increase in her allowance, and the rest tell her to do her chores. That’s not much of an exaggeration. Gilder is also pretty incoherent, but the others have some interesting things to say.

And this talk between Ed Feigenbaum and Bob Kahn should open a few eyes. Kahn says he’s not interested in network neutrality (1:44 in), which to him is a destructive slogan. Networks are built on incremental improvements, and net neutrality stifles that growth. Here’s some quotes:

If it’s more efficient to do things inside the net than outside the net, I’m OK with that…Companies that make innovations should be able to control them…You really want to incentivize people to innovate…I’m totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net.

He says he doesn’t agree with his former assistant, Google’s Cerf, that innovation has to be pushed outside the net.

(Note: Bob Kahn is the guy who actually invented the Internet, not Al Gore, not Vint Cerf, not Jon Postel, not Bob Metcalfe, not Tim Berners-Lee. Bob Kahn invented the Internet and he’s against network neutrality. This will be on the test, so write it down.)

The title of this post is a slogan one of my fellow engineers at Texas Instruments had in his cubicle in the early 80s when we were developing the first network-based operating systems. Engineers understand that money doesn’t grow ion trees, the Tooth Fairy doesn’t leave it under your pillow, and that real stuff has to be paid for. It would be great if the laws of physics could be suspended and Our Internet could have all three virtues, but in the real world (the place where engineers are paid to make trade-offs) this isn’t going to happen. If you want your network to be fast and reliable, it’s going to be expensive; if you want it to be cheap, it has to be either slow or unreliable.

Two common networks make this trade in different ways: the telephone network is highly reliable and not very expensive, but it’s not fast. The packet network that we call the Internet is faster and more expensive than the telephone network, but it’s less reliable in the sense that it’s performance is more variable. Neither network is more virtuous than the other, they just make the trade-offs in ways that are appropriate to the ways the networks are used, to the kind of traffic they carry.

Our pals at Free Press, the organization that created Save the Internet and pays its employees, unveiled a new plan for the Internet at its annual conference this week. Free Press, by the way, is primarily concerned that deregulation of media ownership law a threat to our democracy, just as deregulation of Internet access networks is, you guessed it, a threat to our democracy.

Free Press’ plan for the Internet is couched as Declaration of Internet Freedoms and goes like this:

* Universal Affordable Access: Broadband Internet access should be universally available and affordable.

* An Open and Neutral Network: Access to broadband networks should be open to all producers and consumers of Internet content on fair and equal terms without discrimination.

* World Class Quality through Competition: America must build the world’s most advanced communications networks and maximize competition on those networks.

That sounds an awful lot like “Cheap, Good, and Fast: I want all three.”

I’m sorry, but that’s not how things work on the planet Earth. Upgrading the overall quality of our broadband networks is going to take a large infusion of cash, to the tune of several billion dollars. That money will be spent running fiber optic cables, buying routers to light the fiber, building network operations centers to spot and repair problems, upgrading routers inside homes and businesses, and purchasing long-haul fiber optic circuits. The Internet doesn’t generate enough carrier revenue to pay for this upgrade by itself, so the carriers will have to pay for it in no small part by selling the stuff that people are willing to pay for, television and phone service.

That’s the way we’ve always paid for infrastructure in the US, and it’s the way it’s paid for in other countries as well. You can get a raw connection rate of 100 megabits/second in Korea, but you can use any VoIP but the one provided by Korea Telecom. Similar rules pertain in the UK and in France. That’s a violation of network neutrality, but it takes place in the places Free Press touts as Model Nations.

The net result, pardon the pun, of the regulations proposed by Free Press on the American Internet access network can only be one thing: the network will never be substantially upgraded because there won’t be any money in it.

And that’s what happens when you go for Good, Fast AND Cheap: you got none of them.

Matt Sherman notices Stanford University law professor and copyright crusader Larry Lessig expressing doubts about some of the regulatory jihads he’s embraced recently. Lessig admits to being wrong about the Microsoft anti-trust case because it was rendered moot by the relative success of Linux. The professor is less certain he was wrong about net neutrality, but his mind seems to be opening just a bit.

Unfortunately, Lessig is still caught up in a false dichotomy between government-regulated networks vs. government-operated ones:

Those who oppose network-neutrality regulation should also oppose this regulation of last-mile broadband’s most important competitor. Municipal competition won’t kill commercial broadband any more than Linux has killed Windows. Yet it could change the business model of last-mile broadband, just as Linux has changed the business model of Microsoft. If there’s going to be a Linux-like miracle to counteract innovation-threatening broadband business models, then, at a minimum, miracles must not be a crime.

If the only competition AT&T and Verizon had was government-operated networks, their stock would outperform the markets to an extreme degree. In fact, their real competition can really come only from other for-profit companies smart enough to hire good people and develop sensible business plans. The one tip I’d give regulators is not to allow telcos to control too many different media. Licensed WiMax is a big threat to residential broadband over twisted-pair, so it’s best not to allow telcos to have a large piece of that action.

Ultimately, the free market will keep AT&T’s rapacious instincts in check better than any half-baked regulatory scheme, but only if it’s allowed to develop. For that reason, the provision of the AT&T/Bell South merger agreement about WiMax divestiture was good; the rest of it is garbage.

A week has passed since AT&T submitted to the will of Democrat FCC commissioners Copps and Adelstein by volunteering to “network neutrality” regulations and we’ve seen the entire range of possible reactions. Not from the pro-neutrality vs. the anti-neutrality forces, mind you, but from within the ranks of the regulationists themselves. Free Press’ chief telecom wonk Ben Scott touts the agreement and his own press blurbs on the Astroturf Save The Internet blog and Columbia law professor Tim Wu gushes about the “historic” nature of the agreement in the same venue.

But all is not happy in Neutland. Another law professor and neutrality hard-liner, Susan Crawford, says the agreement is the end of the Internet (copy paste http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/12/29/2604993.html into your browser, she won’t allow direct linking from here), and late-breaking neutarian Tom Evslin says the agreement is a sham. Others on the pro-regulation side say the agreement is hollow as the FCC’s majority doesn’t intend to enforce it.

So depending on which virtuous, regulation-happy soul you want to believe, the AT&T merger agreement is either the best thing that’s ever happened to the Internet, the worst thing, or nothing at all. That’s a lot to choose from, but don’t worry, I can explain everything in a very few words.

If you read Ben Scott’s quotes, it’s clear that he’s happy about two things:

1) The merger agreement contains a definition of “network neutrality”; and
2) It imposes telecom network regulations on at least part of the AT&T DSL network.

The first is really nothing, because the definition used in the agreement was simply lifted out of the Snowe-Dorgan Internet Freedom Preservation Act and has no special significance beyond the fact that the Democrat commissioners were familiar with it. Scott claims it puts the lie to the claim that “nobody can define network neutrality”, but that never was the issue, really. The intellectual problem with neutrality is that everyone can define it, generally in many different ways. Some say it’s about routing, some say it’s about delivery times, some say it’s about unbundling and some say it’s simply about pricing. As the agreement contains many of these elements, we’re still no closer to a universal understanding of network neutrality than we were when Professor Wu coined the term a few months ago.

And that, I believe, explains why Wu is so giddy over the agreement: it ensures that the term he coined will be part of the discourse on Internet regulation for years to come, extending his fifteen minutes of fame. That’s good for book sales, speaking gigs, and tenure. And more power to him for that, it’s no small feat to manufacture a regulatory principle out of thin air and have it stick to a major merger agreement.

The reason Ben Scott is so happy is because the agreement applies telecom regulations to the Internet. He’s a telecom regulator, you see, not an Internet guy, so he was facing unemployment if the trend toward de-regulated networks embodied by the historical Internet continued. But now he believes he’s made the case that the Internet is no different from an old-fashioned telephone network (in a regulatory sense) so he’s still relevant.

And this is the reason Evslin and Crawford are unhappy. They’re Internet people, not telecom people, and they understand enough about the Internet to see that it’s not at all like a phone network and can’t be treated that way. They’re all for regulating it in principle, but skeptical about the applicability of Scott’s wisdom to a fundamentally different medium. So they naturally point out that the telecom wonks who forged the agreement have missed the point so badly that they’ve actually made things worse for the Internet.

So this is the bottom line: the AT&T merger agreement applies traditional telecom law to the Internet, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether you think the Internet is phone network.

Just so we’re clear, networks of the past were designed for a single service: the telegraph network only carried telegrams, not phone calls; the telecom network wasn’t designed for television, and the CATV network, in its original form, didn’t carry data or voice. The Internet is a packet data network that fundamentally is capable of serving a variety of needs without much effort: e-mail, porn, video, and voice are all happy on it, more or less.

If we’re going to get regulatory with the Internet, we’re not going very far until we recognize this unique character. It’s not enough to be strict about how users of a single service are treated relative to each other, we have to understand how different services relate to each other. The telecom wonks’ approach is simply to ban “different services” in order to force-fit the Internet into the Procrustean Bed of the traditional regulatory model. The disgruntled neuts are sounder in their reaction to the agreement than the happy-faced ones, more in tune with the Internet’s character and less reactionary.

To be perfectly frank, Ben Scott and Tim Wu are rank opportunists who obviously care much less about Your Internet than about Their Own Careers. That’s not a bad thing, but it is something you should bear in mind lest you find their jubilation infectious.

UPDATE: Matt Sherman surveys yet another reaction.