Author: RB

T.J. Rodgers is probably the smartest CEO in Silicon Valley. So what does he think about net neutrality?

Rodgers: This is where basically the Net is not allowed to discriminate? I think it’s an obscenity. I think people that have paid for the wires and cables should able to charge whatever they want for their product. And for other people to come in and force companies to run their businesses and set their prices is absurd. If some of those companies came into being by virtue of a government monopoly–the old AT&T comes to mind–then fine. But to go and tell companies what they can and cannot charge money for–that’s un-American. It’s against freedom. It’s just bad news.

Like I said, he’s a smart guy.

Prominent network engineers Jon Stewart and Alyssa Milano have bashed Sen. Ted Stevens for his description of the Internet, but it was actually pretty accurate. See Prof. Ed Felton’s explanation:

I’ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But’s let’s give the guy a break. He was speaking off the cuff in a meeting, and he sounds a bit agitated. Have you ever listened to a recording of yourself speaking in an unscripted setting? For most people, it’s pretty depressing. We misspeak, drop words, repeat phrases, and mangle sentences all the time. Normally, listeners’ brains edit out the errors.

In this light, some of the ridicule of Stevens seems a bit unfair. He said the Internet is made up of “tubes”. Taken literally, that’s crazy. But experts talk about “pipes” all the time. Is the gap between “tubes” and “pipes” really so large? And when Stevens says that his staff sent him “an Internet” and it took several days to arrive, it sounds to me like he meant to say “an email” and just misspoke.

So let’s take Stevens seriously, and consider the possibility that somewhere in his head, or in the head of a staffer telling him what to say, there was a coherent argument that was supposed to come out of Stevens’ mouth but was garbled into what we heard. Let’s try to reconstruct that argument and see if it makes any sense.

Not that we want to interfere with anybodys good time, mind you, but Stevens understands computers and the Internet better than say, Jon Stewart. And Stewart’s slam pretty well hits the Neuts in the face: if you believe Stevens is a clueless moron, why do you insist that he impose new and unprecedented regulations on the Internet for you?

Here they go again. The Neutralists are claiming that Comcast censored an ABC news segment on the sleeping Comcast technician, so we need heavy regulations for the Internet.

But like the last five such claims they’ve made, this one is also nothing but hot air:

UPDATE: ABC said they confim it was an editing error on their part. If so, the gaffe should be seen at any of their ABC News Now vendors, which include which include AOL, Bellsouth, SBC/Yahoo and Verizon. We’re still working on scanning and uploading the AOL manual, so if any readers want to go and try and corroborate with snagged video clips and send them to us, that would be awesome.

UPDATE: Comcast says the feed has been repaired and can be seen on their site here (requires subscription). They also say the problem was replicated for all their outlets, not just Comcast. Without any other verification available at this time, we’ll have to take their word for it. No complaints were heard from users of the four other services.

The Consumerist had the integrity to run a correction, albeit it really lame one. How many neut blogs will go even that far? Not Save the Internet, where the original false story is still the most recent blog, and a nice lead to similarly paranoid drooling about MySpace and Craig’s Listhas finally been deleted.

Incidentally, Precursor has a nice little Flash animation that goes after the Freudian slip committed by the owners of “It’s Our Net, Dammit”. After listening to Dave Farber “debate” Vint Cerf, I can see the Royal Sense of Entitlement the content barons have. Cerf simply recited sound bites for an hour, and nothing he said lead any credence to the claim that he has a technical background. You can read the same sound bites on Save the Internet, with pictures.

UPDATE: Save the Internet deleted my trackback from their uncorreced story.

That’s what censorship looks like.

UPDATE: Kudos to Save the Internet for deleting the phony story. Maybe there’s hope for them yet.

Orlowski’s review of the Grand Old Geezer smackdown is spot-on:

Comment The rolling net “neutrality” debate brought two of the internet’s most distinguished elder statesmen together in mortal combat this week. The two gentlemen, Vint Cerf and Dave Farber, said they agreed on most things. But where they didn’t, they tried to pull the chair away just as their opponent tried to sit down.

Farber had the factrs on his side, but he’s not nearly as smooth as the well-trained Cerf so it wasn’t apparent.

Debating tip for Farber: Don’t make your strongest points as “asides”, develop them full on.

Comment for Cerf: You’re the intellectual equivalent of polyester, dude. Thanks.

eWeek covers the debate between Dave Farber and one of his former students:

Professor Farber, on the other hand, said that he worried about too much Congressional meddling, if only because it might prevent the next major innovations from coming to the Internet.

He noted that he agreed with Cerf that there are plenty of mechanisms in place now to protect against abuse by broadband providers.

He did note, however that he doesn’t believe that the FCC has an unblemished record in such protection. He also noted that the FCC can have its decisions tied up in courts for a very long time, delaying enforcement.

But he also noted that the FCC can act quickly, such as when it acted to require phone companies that provided Internet service to also allow VOIP (voice over IP) calls.

What Farber is most worried about, he said, is poorly drafted legislation that would leave regulation of the Internet open to broad interpretations that could lead to unintended restrictions on the use of the Internet .

He said that regulators, in an attempt to somehow make the Internet more fair, could actually end up restricting access. “The net work never has been a fair place,” he said.

(I’ve always spelled it “network”, but that’s just me apparently.)

I’d like to hear a podcast.

Networks need Quality of Service mechanisms if they are required to carry low-jitter traffic such as voice or video-conferencing alongside a large volume of other traffic, such as large pre-recorded HDTV files. It doesn’t matter how much bandwidth the network has at maximum. File transfers on packet networks are designed to use all available bandwidth, so you’re always going to have situations where bursts of file data cause jitter to voice.

This is an inconvenient truth for the “fat pipe, always free” folks, so the generally try and define it out of existence. Here’s a good example from the U of Oregon’s head network admin, Dr. Joe St. Sauver:

Artificial/Unrealistic Demands

• At the same time I oppose metering, you should also know that I oppose artificial/unrealistic “tests” or “challenges” of converged networks.

• For example, a classic example of an unrealistic network demand for a converged network is uncompressed high definition video over IP – that can run 1.2-1.5 gigabit per second. At that rate, dedicated video networks make sense.

• There’s no problem handling MPEG1 video (at 1.5Mbps) however, or even reasonable amounts of MPEG2 video at 1.5 to 20Mbps (on a fast ethernet connection going into a gig core).

Are you getting that? Dr. Joe’s non-priority scheme only works if each users has: A) 100 Mbps straight to a 1 gig “core” and he never uses it to transfer large HDTV files, compressed or otherwise.

Gee, that’s nice. But here on Planet Earth, we’re trying to figure out how to move multiple HDTV streams over connections much less broad than that, because, you know, bandwidth isn’t free off the University of Oregon’s campus.

And even in this scenario, what happens if 10 people are using their 100 Mbps Ethernet connections to the Gig core to transfer big video files? The core is maxed out. And then somebody comes along and tries to use VoIP while all this traffic is flowing. Boom.

That’s what QoS is for. No matter how fast a link is, it can always be overloaded because a billion people use the Internet, and not always at the ideal time.

Bummer.

H/T Frank Paynter.

There’s an interesting interview up at The Register:

So on January 1, 1983 when TCP/IP was deployed, it all worked fine. Primarily the net was used for email. Then there were more FTP sessions, and it began to melt down.

So people were writing a lot of papers in mid-1984 about what was then called “congestion collapse” Some of the design features of TCP windowing actually made congestion worse; so protocol engineers went to work. They made enhancements to TCP such as Exponential Backoff – another thing stolen directly from old Ethernet and Slow Start – where the initial window size is small. They re-engineered TCP to solve IP’s congestion problem.

Today, the internet is only stable to the extent people are using TCP over it. People also tend to miss that you can defeat TCP’s attempt to limit traffic over something less than congestion of the backbone if you simply have multiple instances of TCP.

Some guy with strong opinions.

This could be mildly amusing:

The Center for American Progress is pleased to present Dr. Vinton Cerf and Professor David Farber in “The Great Debate: What is Net Neutrality?” The event is currently sold out for attendees on-site, but you may access the reservation page to be put on a waiting list here.

The event will take place from 10:30-12:00 on Monday, July 17 at the Center’s event space, which is located at 1333 H Street, NW, 10th Floor, Washington, D.C. Audio streaming from the event will be available at the following URL:

* http://public.resource.org/neutral.m3u
* http://streaming-radio.americanprogress.org/event
* (Streaming will activate one hour before event.)

Our streaming servers have capacity for the first 200 listeners. The stream will be audio only. (If anybody would like to provide additional streaming capacity, please feel free to contact Carl at:

* mailto:[email protected]?subject=neutrality

A Jabber conference room will be available for people who wish to contribute running commentary:

* xmpp:[email protected]
* ALTERNATIVE ADDRESS: xmpp:[email protected]

Audience members will be able to submit questions using Jabber-compliant software such as Google Talk or iChat. You may send your questions here:

* xmpp:[email protected]
* ALTERNATIVE ADDRESS: xmpp:[email protected]

(If your instant messaging client doesn’t support XMPP URL’s, you may go to the conference room using “go to group chat” or “join conference” or a similar command in your client. Likewise, to send a question, simply send a message to [email protected].)blockquote>

A grad student in media studies named Bill Herman makes an earnest attempt to rationalize Snowe-Dorgan for Public Knowledge and fails miserably:

For instance, what in the Snowe-Dorgan proposal, S 2917, mandates a specific internet architecture? The text is remarkably free of techno jargon. It forbids the blocking or degrading of legal net traffic, but it specifically authorizes companies to prioritize packets. If VoIP and streaming video need a smarter network, companies can build that smarter network. They just cannot charge extra for delivery of those specific services.

Technical people schooled in network protocols in general and priority-based QoS see the hole in his argument instantly: Priority-based QoS isn’t something you can give to everybody. There are a very limited set of time slots available on any network segment for low-latency delivery, and the only way we have to guarantee QoS to limit the number of QoS users at each segment in the routes we find for QoS. And that implies some sort of queue policing, which in general is triggered by a service contract.

So Snowe-Dorgan does mandate an architecture for datalinks and network segments, and it just so happens that the architecture it mandates is out of step with all new networks engineered in the past 10 years: WMM for WiFi, MBOA UWB, IEEE 802.15.3a UWB, WiMax, and even DOCSIS. Network engineers know this stuff, but media critics don’t.

As far as the “strike now while the iron is hot” argument goes, the argument for taking rash action because the issue will soon fade from public interest is the best argument for doing nothing we could possibly have. If the predictions of abuse the pro-regulation neutralists have made come true, the issue will certainly not fade from the public’s attention; that only happens if the predictions of abuse don’t materialize.

The neutralists have put themselves between a rock and hard place by making these hysterical claims, by the way. If nothing happens on the regulation front this year and these dire predictions fail to materialize, their credibility will certainly be damaged, perhaps permanently.

See the Ed Felton paper for the background on Herman’s complaints. The paper has a number of smallish technical errors, but reaches the right conclusion anyway.

Computerworld has a pretty good summary of the Net Neutrality issues today:

In a May 17 letter to congressional leaders, 35 manufacturers — including Alcatel, Cisco, Corning,and Qualcomm — said there’s no evidence that broadband providers now block or impair competing content. The Internet doesn’t need the burden of new regulations, the letter said, adding that passing a bill risks “hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules.”

The network equipment vendors are the closest thing we have to an informed and neutral party in this debate, so their opinion should carry a lot of weight.