Next Wednesday, March 12, Brett Glass and I will be speaking on network management at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation‘s office in Washington, DC.
For me, this will be an opportunity to develop some of the points I raised but didn’t have time to flesh out at the FCC hearing at Harvard, such as per-user fairness, Quality of Service tagging, and the role of back-pressure in the IETF model of congestion management. Most of the heavy lifting on traffic management is done inside ISP broadband networks today, and the Internet protocols have some unfortunate side effects when layered on top of them.
I’ll also explain the consequences of applying Free Press’ “Deadwood System” to modern broadband networks and contrast it with a practical alternative.
Next on the speaking agenda is an appearance at Supernova 2008, one of the premier events at the intersection of networking and public policy. I’d like to speak at Dave Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect, but he’s not real thrilled about the idea. Isenberg trashed me in absentia during a talk Tom Evslin made at the Berkman Center a while back, and I’d like equal time to respond.
UPDATE: Mr. Isenberg has offered me free registration to F2C. That’s not as good as a place at the table, but it’s a start. I should point out that his conference is highly-regarded by people who agree with his “stupid network” formulation as well as by those who don’t. We all want our networking experience to be as free from barriers as possible, we just disagree on which barriers are most significant. In Isenberg’s world, the carriers are the problem because they want to squeeze every last penny out of their customers; in mine, the biggest barrier is the unbridled appetite for network bandwidth of about 1% of the people who share wires with me. His concern is theoretical, while mine is real.
One thing that is very ironic about the behavior of the “network neutrality” folks is that they claim to be interested in “free speech” yet are attempting to suppress important (and perhaps inconvenient) information. Lauren Weinstein, for example, heavily filters comments to his “NNSquad” (“network neutrality squad”) so that all discussions miraculously seem to reinforce his preconceived notions and his anti-ISP agenda. David Isenberg seems to be above this and should have you as a speaker.
Lauren not only censors his list, he adds his own editorial comments to messages expressing contrary viewpoints. Isenberg is indeed above this, as my update indicates.
I was there. You made a nice presentation but I missed a couple of things. Could you post your slides?
Check this link for the slides. Glad you could make it.