Category: Networks

Net neutrality is a fiction, and not even a useful one. I’m working on a short essay laying out the salient points, and trying to sort out some of Tim Berners-Lee’s eccentric notions. See Sir Web’s blog for the back-and-forth.

Recent developments on the neut front have the New York Times showing a failure to grasp the concept:

“Net neutrality” is a concept that is still unfamiliar to most Americans, but it keeps the Internet democratic. Cable and telephone companies that provide Internet service are talking about creating a two-tiered Internet, in which Web sites that pay them large fees would get priority over everything else. Opponents of these plans are supporting Net-neutrality legislation, which would require all Web sites to be treated equally. Net neutrality recently suffered a setback in the House, but there is growing hope that the Senate will take up the cause.

And Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee flying off into a socialist Neverland:

It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing. We pay for connection to the Net as though it were a cloud which magically delivers our packets. 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 we each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to me.

There’s actually nothing magical about how the Internet delivers packets, it’s a machine that follows a strict set of rules. The Net Neutrality advocates are indeed hostile to levels of service that are good for video or good for audio, and nobody is even thinking about a service that blocks access to anybody; in actual fact the COPE Act that was passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee expressly forbids that. So this is simply another strawman argument from somebody who should know better.

Here are two items from the neut front. First an article in Salon by Big Neut Tim Wu in which he makes a little sense:

None of this is to say that a good network-neutrality rule must be absolute, or even close to absolute. It’s an open secret that AT&T and Verizon want to become more like cable television companies. If Verizon wants to build a private network to sell TV, that would justify broad powers to control the network, a precondition to providing the service at all. No neutrality rule should be a bar to building better networks that do more.

OK, so why are you trying to do just that, prevent American companies from building better networks?

And the other is a piece by Mumon, a very prominent figure in the world of wireless networks:

The real issue for “net neutrality” is that an advanced internet needs to be built, financed, and initiated through the government help, like it is in Korea, Japan, and China. That’s why our access charges are so steep relative to these places. Put big pipes everwhere, and the high class QoS services can easily coexist with the best effort folks. That’s an issue of capital infrastructure deployment and build-out, which in the US, with its lack of centralized planning for such things, doesn’t exist. Hopefully rapid deployment of true competitive access schemes (Broadband Power Line, WiMax) might alleviate this problem. But that takes a new policy, committment, and intervention, with a quid-pro-quo of warranties of operability.

Mumon cites the WaPo’s editorial today, and essentially agrees with it:

Yet perhaps without realizing it, those who are now advocating “net neutrality”– the notion that those who shell out the big bucks to build new much higher speed networks can’t ask the websites that will use the networks intensively to help pay for them– could keep this new world from becoming a reality. Further, they could deprive the websites themselves of the benefits of being able to use the networks to deliver their data-heavy content.

That’s all I have time for today.

The Senate took a step toward preserving the freedom to innovate yesterday with the introduction of a telecom bill that puts the wild claims of the net neuts in perspective:

Absent from the legislation are any regulations related to “Net neutrality,” also known as network neutrality, that companies such as Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, Intel and Microsoft have been lobbying for during the past few months. Instead of handing the Federal Communications Commission extensive powers to police violations–an idea defeated in a House of Representatives committee vote last week–the FCC would merely be required to prepare annual reports on any problems.

That’s exactly what’s appropriate for now: show us a problem and we’ll fix it, but buzz off if all you have is hysteria.

Sen. Ted Stevens is no dummy.

The Google-backed coalition that’s trying to stifle the growth of America’s communication networks is at it again, lying their asses off spinning like dervishes on speed:

As of this morning, more than 1,500 blogs have taken up the cause, posting links to SavetheInternet.com or urging their readers to take action by calling on members of Congress to stand firm in defense of Internet freedom. And the Hill is hearing it.

According to these slimy bastards fellow citizens, every blog that’s posted a link to their site supports their wacky fascist regulations. But this blog has linked to them, and I don’t support their goals, and neither do the other blogs I’ve cited on this subject. In fact, a scan of the blogs that have been discussing this issue will show you that technical bloggers and free marketeers almost universally oppose the “net neutering” legislation proposed by Google’s coalition, while support is mainly concentrated in left wing blogs who actually are pushing for a government-funded and government-controlled Internet (but not exclusively; some right wing blogs run by people who don’t have technical knowledge — such as the Instapundit — have joined the fray on the wrong side.)

When governments and Google control the Internet, you get something like China. We don’t want that in America, we want market-based systems where experimentation isn’t hampered by fascist rules about how packets are forwarded.

Don’t be misled.

A good example of a thoughtful approach to the problem comes from Kevin Drum. Kevin’s a good, card-carrying Democrat who runs a highly-respected left wing blog, but he’s got some background in the video business so he’s not fooled by the hysteria Google’s astroturf alliance is spreading. Check him out:

Video-on-Demand is a market I know a little bit about (at least, I did back when I worked for a startup VOD company), and the bandwidth and service issues that face commercial VOD rollouts are quite real. You and I may or may not care about VOD, but a lot of people do, and when telecom companies say that they need to make substantial investments to support large-scale VOD, they’re right. When they further say that these investments will only be worthwhile if they can guarantee VOD service that works reliably and well, they’re right again.

The question, of course, is whether the only way to provide reliable VOD service over the internet is to offer a tiered service to video providers. I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s not transparently absurd to think that the answer might be yes.

Yup.

From the illustrious Guardian we learn:

Yahoo appears to have kowtowed to the Chinese government yet again and passed details of a fourth dissident writer’s email account to the security forces, brightening the spotlight thrown on the dubious compromises that western businesses are making to operate within the world’s second largest internet market.

Doing business in China has always involved a heavy dose of realpolitik – a senior mobile phone industry executive, desperate to get into the world’s fastest growing mobile market, once described operating in China to me as akin to walking into a room and taking down his trousers. But what makes Yahoo’s flagrant co-operation and the recent self-censorship carried out by search engine rival Google so shocking to web users, is that the internet has been sold to the world as a tool for free speech not for maintaining or even strengthening the political status quo.

Google and Yahoo lecture the US Congress on free speech under the guise of “net neutrality” while helping communist China oppress dissidents. Who are they kidding?

Here’s the statement issued by Democrat Charlie Gonzales of San Antonio, TX, on the fascist “net-neutrality” nonsense:

“On its face, the Markey amendments seems fair, but the more you look at the implications of this legislation, the less fair it seems. Its most immediate consequence would be to exempt highly profitable companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google from having to pay to use another company’s cable
network. In essence, this would allow Internet giants to reap the benefits of operating a cable network with none of the risks or costs. Forcing cable providers to give a free-ride to companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google will ultimately work against consumers by undermining the financial incentive to develop the next generation of network technologies. It would also subsidize the efforts of companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google to expand their dominance of most Internet commerce and to use their brain power to force smaller companies to partner rather than compete against them.”

Excellent, at least one Democrat has his head on straight.

UPDATE: Let’s go over the issues again, as this post has been linked by Google’s people and it doesn’t have any context. The telcos are presently disadvantaged relative to their biggest competitor in the broadband market, the cable companies, on two counts: the cable companies have a technically superior cable plant (coax instead of telephone wire) and they’re less regulated. Cable companies don’t have to share ISP revenue with third parties if they don’t want to.

The telcos therefore would like to upgrade their cable plants to something better, most likely optical fiber, but they don’t want to do that until they’re on a level playing field with cable. You’ll notice the cable companies are pretty quiet on this debate, leaving Google, Yahoo, and the net Luddites to carry the water for them.

Cable companies have been able to install their wiring because they have several service offerings with which to pay for it, mainly analog and digital TV, but also voice services and cable Internet. Internet is basically a free-rider on this system, because it was paid for by TV.

So the approach that the telcos want to take to paying for their optical network is to offer television as well as voice and Internet, and that’s why they sought the COPE bill that the Congress just passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee. It grants federal video franchises to companies operating in areas where a cable TV franchise already exists. Are you with me so far? Google’s Save the Internet Coalition is butting into a debate over cable TV.

Now there are couple of things that could really sour the deal for the telcos where this financing plan is concerned, VoIP and Internet video. That is to say that it will be practical for people to drop their traditional phone service in favor of something like Skype or Vonage if everybody as a 100 Mb/s fiber going into their home, and it will also be practical for them to drop cable TV and just download TV shows off the Internet. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft want to be in the business to providing these services.

As the Telcos aren’t sure how much they’re going to be hurt by all this competition, they’d like to have the flexibility to ensure that their voice and video services work better than those provided by Google and Yahoo, the free-riders who didn’t have to pay for the network. It’s not clear that consumers are going to stand for that, so another option is to let the free-riders subsidize the users’ broadband bill out their ample advertising revenue.

One thing that is clear is that we aren’t going to get optical fiber installed all over America for free. Traditionally, the costs of television have been born partially by consumers and partially by advertisers. The plans that the telcos have for fiber simply continue that model, and they don’t really have any effect on the kind of web-surfing, blogging, and e-mailing that you’re doing today.

I know these things because I’m a network protocol engineer who’s been working in the area of video, the Internet, and local area networks for a long time (I designed the cable system Ethernet uses today, for example.) I’m not being paid by any telephone company, and in fact I’ve never worked for one or consulted with one. This is the straight scoop and I think you have the right to hear it from somebody who knows the issues and doesn’t have an ax to grind.

The faux grassroots Save the Internet Coalition funded by Google, Microsoft, EBay, Amazon, and Yahoo failed to convince the House Commerce Committee that their hysterical claims about the Impending Death of the Internet were well-founded today, and the Committee voted their Markey Amendment down by a 34-22 vote. True to form, they’re hailing this defeat as a victory:

The Markey Amendment failed in committee 22-34. Democrats Rush, Green, Gonzalez, Towns, and Wynn all voted no on the amendment and betrayed the netroots. The rest of the committee Democrats voted for the amendment.

Action now moves to the Senate.

The thing that annoys me most about this group is their total lack of integrity; I dislike that even more than the pie-in-the-sky insistence on getting a free ride from the Telcos. The fact that they can get the door slammed in their faces for a second time and call it “Victory” underscores the point.

Here’s a link to the bogus Markey Amendment.