Networking
Some clever wag once said that a political gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. Here’s Zoe Lofgren accidentally telling the truth about her corporate masters:
“Google is a multi-billion corporation that was founded in a Stanford dorm room. That is about to change, unless this House adopts net neutrality rules.”
Google will no longer be a multi-billion dollar corporation if it can’t control the Internet, you see. Truth is so refreshing.
A new proposal in the U.S. House of Representatives takes the concept of mandatory Net neutrality that companies like Amazon.com, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have publicly embraced–and extends it to, well, those same companies.
Rep. Charles Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat, has proposed an amendment (click for PDF) to a telecommunications bill being debated Thursday that says neither broadband providers nor commercial Web sites and search engines may engage in so-called discriminatory practices.
(Also on Thursday, the House rejected the original Net neutrality amendment aimed at broadband providers proposed by Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat.)
Charlie Gonzales is one of my heroes.
The Mercury News finally ran a decent anti-regulation Op-Ed today:
As more and more of our lives migrate to the Internet, if we want our TV viewing, phone conversations and other applications to be at least as reliable as they are now, it is critical that networks be allowed to become smarter — to partition bandwidth and prioritize packets to make sure that different types of content get appropriate handling. The equivalent of HOV lanes (which give priority during heavy traffic) and FedEx delivery (which allows people to pay more for faster and more reliable service) must be permitted on the Internet for it to become what we all want it to be.
Maybe someday we’ll have the techno-utopian world of infinite bandwidth, but the last time I checked, there isn’t an infinite supply of anything. So, in a world with limited bandwidth, should traffic from an Internet-connected toaster have the same network priority handling as the VoIP traffic from police and fire departments?
Network neutrality proponents answer that question “yes.” But the correct answer is so obviously “no” that there is clearly some other agenda at work.
It’s a day late, but who cares, Googoo lost their bid to control the Internet.
The Googoo (Google + Yahoo) Coalition didn’t learn anything from their humiliating defeat in the House yesterday. Free Press founder Bob McChesney is still singing the same old song:
If we lose Net Neutrality, we lose the most promising method for regular people to access and provide diverse and independent news, information and entertainment. We will see the Internet become like cable TV: a handful of massive companies will decide what you can see and how much it will cost. Gone will be the entrepreneurship and innovation that has made the Internet the most important cultural and economic engine of our times.
A huge pack of lies, as nobody wants to censor your news. The Enhanced Services concept actually reduces inequities in the performance of the not-at-all-neutral Internet of today and allows new applications to flourish tomorrow.
Read similar sentiments from McChesney’s partners in the Regulate the Internet Coalition:
“Special interest advocates from telephone and cable companies have flooded the Congress with misinformation delivered by an army of lobbyists to undermine decades-long federal practice of prohibiting network owners from discriminating against competitors to shut out competition. Unless the Senate steps in, today’s vote marks the beginning of the end of the Internet as an engine of new competition, entrepreneurship and innovation,” said Consumers Union Senior Policy Analyst Jeannine Kenney.
In other words, “I have no clue about this whole Internet thing but I’m really, really scared that Google can’t buy itself a permanent niche on it.”
“The American public favors an open and neutral Internet and does not want gatekeepers taxing innovation and throttling the free market,” said Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press. “The House has seriously undermined access to information and democratic communication. Despite the revisionist history propagated by the telcos and their lobbyists, until last year, the Internet had always been a neutral network.
Well, yeah, except the Internet is not now nor has it ever been a neutral network and you’re lying when you say it has been.
“This is not Google vs. AT&T,” said Mark Cooper, Director of Research at Consumers Federation of America. “CFA has been battling to keep the phone companies from putting tollbooths on the Internet since the early 1980’s, but now every business and every consumer that uses the Internet has a dog in the fight for Internet Freedom. This coalition will continue to grow, millions of Americans will add their voices, and Congress will not escape the roar of public opinion until Congress passes enforceable net neutrality.”
Yeah, right. Look, dude, you should stick to evaluating toasters and leave big complicated things like networks to the people who understand them. If we need your help, we’ll ask for it.
The fight moves on the Senate, presuming the Googoo Coalition doesn’t get enlightened first, where I predict a similar outcome.
The fundamental problem with the Googoo Coalition is its refusal to admit that it wants to engage in regulation and the consequent failure to devise a realistic regulatory framework. If you’re not honest about what you’re doing, it’s hard to do it well.
Here’s a good, honest, factual account of the Google snow-job that failed from the Associated Press:
Demanding assurances of net neutrality are content providers such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo! Inc., and Internet users ranging from the Christian Coalition to rock musicians.
Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., offered an amendment stating that broadband network providers must not discriminate against or interfere with users’ ability to access or offer lawful content.
Without that amendment, said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, “telecommunications and cable companies will be able to create toll lanes on the information superhighway. This strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the Internet.”
It was defeated 269-152. “You can call an amendment net neutrality,” said Rep. Paul Gillmor, R-Ohio. “But it’s still government regulation.”
Emphasis added, for emphasis. That’s from Frisco, where the local paper had taken the side of corporate welfare for Google. The shameless nature of their regulations is too obvious for reporters to ignore.
The vote on final passage of the COPE Act was 321 – 101. These are the scoundrels and hooligans who were bamboozled by Google into voting against fiber optic broadband networks. Everybody else in the House is a hero today.
Abercrombie
Allen
Baird
Baldwin
Becerra
Berman
Blumenauer
Brady (PA)
Brown (OH)
Capps
Capuano
Case
Cleaver
Conyers
Continue reading “The Rogues Gallery”
I’m listening to the House debate on the Markey Amendment with the fraudulent “net neutrality” regulations. Listening to these guys describe the Internet is one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever experienced, like the blind men and the elephant.
Some yahoo from W. Va. is talking about a “two-lane Internet” now. Like a one-lane road is better? His poor momma.
Guy from Texas says “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Amen.
Inslee from WA. says there’s a non-discrimination principle in the DNA of the Internet, that all bits are equal. He better not learn about the TOS header, or check the ping times between yahoo and everybody else.
Lady from Tennessee, Blackburn, says Markey bites because she Googled net neutrality and nobody can agree what it means. She must have read hit #1, Wikipedia. Check it out.
Anna Eshoo, one of my former representatives, is drooling about equal access and “profound change to the Internet”. She doesn’t understand the difference between speed and QoS. It’s about The Future, dude. Google’s bitch is calling Republicans crooks. Takes one to know one.
Charlie Gonzales is talking to bloggers: “this is not about you”. And he’s right, it’s about Google and Yahoo. Markey takes sides, choosing Google over the Internet. He also says it’s driven by hostility to the phone company, there’s no doubt about that.
Dingell lies about the Markey Amendment, saying it preserves the status quo. Sorry, dude, but there is no law today, nor has their been on in the past, forbidding QoS tiering. This is the fictitious history that Google’s coalition has written for the Internet.
Ferguson says Markey’s Amendment is a solution in search of a problem, and they don’t know what the neutrality word means. He’s also against common carriage price controls, but that’s sort of tangential because Markey goes way overboard. He talks about Network Neutering. He’s a hero.
Some other dude points out that Markey’s approach regulates the Internet. They’re running out of speakers in support of the Amendment.
Democrat Gene Green says the Four Freedoms are in the bill, and says Markey means higher prices for consumers, Google gets a free ride. HDTV takes bandwidth. Right on.
Markey is down to his last speaker, himself. He says the debate is a travesty. His amendment is the travesty. Now he’s drooling about car dealerships, Ferraris, and toll booths. He misrepresents his amendment as “preserving the status quo.” That’s more like horses than cars, dude. Fundamental change is happening, and we don’t want that, do we? Oh, and our choices? Forget it, you need to pay for access to the Internet. Preserve the status quo! Moron.
Barton is doing the close. He points out that “net neutrality” the term didn’t exist nine months ago, and nobody knows what it means. We all want an open Internet, and we all want broadband. So how do we get it, by shackling the phone companies with a flat fee structure, how do you get that? Markey says a Ferrari has to sell for the same price as the Taurus.
Let’s get the US in the broadband game, dude. That’s real Net Neutrality. Great close.
Markey Amendment fails on a voice vote. Excellent! Conyers the clown wants a recorded vote, a fundraising ploy.
That was the best 10-minute debate I ever heard. The votes and all that will be updated shortly.
The Washington Post gives Larry Lessig a soap box from which to spew his drivel today, just in time for the floor vote on the COPE Act. It’s the same story he’s been telling for five years, all about toll booths, gatekeepers, and extortion, complete with a fictitious history of the Internet. Fear-and-smear is what he does for a living, and this Op-Ed is a classic example.
Most of it is blatantly counter-factual, and had he posted it on his blog, it would have been ripped apart like his latest posting on the insane regulatory scheme he’s proposing. Just go look.
Lessig doesn’t understand how the Internet works today and how it needs to work tomorrow in order to keep up with user demands, so he’s blind to the damage that his unprecedented regulations will cause to the nation if they’re enacted.
For the record, here’s the relevant bill text:
If a broadband network provider prioritizes or offers enhanced quality of service to data of a particular type, it must prioritize or offer enhanced quality of service to all data of that type (regardless of the origin or ownership of such data) without imposing a surcharge or other consideration for such prioritization or enhanced quality of service.
Lessig says this is the same ordinary common carrier law that’s governed the Internet from the beginning, but can’t account for the fact that FedEx and DHL are able to offer priority service for a fee under common carrier regulations today.
These apocalyptic fantasies are appealing to conspiracy theorists, but there’s no connection between any real threat facing the Internet and the regulations his irresponsible crusaders are proposing. The “net neutrality” amendment his people want would ban Quality of Service discrimination that’s vital to voice and video over wireless networks, good engineering practices that are widely used today with good results. This would turn the clock back on the development of broadband in America by at least ten years and prevent future innovation.
Nobody should fall for this crap.
So this Sergey Brin character flies his private jet to Washington and cowboys into the Senate Office Building in his jeans and sneakers to set Sen. McCain straight on the net neutrality delusion. According to the Reuters report, he makes an incredibly retarded statement about packet priorities:
“The only way you can have a fast lane that is useful — that people will pay a premium for — is if there are slow lanes,” Brin told reporters after meeting with Republican John McCain, a member of the Senate committee that oversees telecommunications issues.
Wrong, moron. People will pay extra for a special Quality of Service “lane” that provides them consistent service, and it has value even if it’s not faster than the normal “lane”.
The reason is that normal packet traffic is bursty, so its “lane” is sometimes fast and sometimes slow, probably about the same on average as the QoS lane. The traffic in the QoS lane can’t tolerate variations in delivery time because it’s a phone call and not a stinking web page.
Do I have draw sweetums a little picture?
The title of Robert X. Cringely’s tome Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date, was inspired by people like Brin.
After showing he doesn’t have a clue about service tiering, the main issue his goons are trying to criminalize, he then proceeds to tell a bald-faced lie about his company’s collusion with the tyrants who run China:
“We are not actually censoring in China,” he added.
This based on his claim that 99% of Chinese use the uncensored google.com instead of the censored google.cn. Associated Press delivers the slap-down:
The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday that Google’s main Web site, http://www.google.com, was no longer accessible in most Chinese provinces due to censorship efforts, and that it was completely inaccessible throughout China on May 31.
Who you gonna believe, the King of American Internet Regulation or the virtuous French reporters? That’s not even a close call.
Go see what google.cn has to say about Tiananmen, and check the pretty pictures, not one of which shows a pro-democracy dissident being flattened by a tank.
Isn’t there some way we can revoke this clown’s visa and send him back to Russia?
UPDATE: The WaPo account of the hep cat’s trip to the Hill is pretty funny.
All the hoopla in Washington about fictitious network neutrality hasn’t had much effect on the progressive California legislature, where a state-wide version of COPE passed the lower house without a single “no” vote:
By a final 77-0 vote, the state Assembly passed AB 2987 this past Wednesday and the Senate is expected to take up the bill later this summer. If it clears both houses, the bill would provide for a blanket agreement allowing telephone companies to offer cable TV service in California, eliminating the need for phone companies, such as AT&T Inc. in the Sacramento region, to negotiate separate deals with every municipality.
The Kool-Aid hasn’t reached Sacramento. That doesn’t mean it won’t, but few bills that clear the Assembly this easily run into trouble in the Senate.