Category: Current Affairs

I sent this to my US Senator.

Dear Senator Boxer,

I’m a constituent and a network engineer. I invented key parts of the communications systems used by your personal computers (Ethernet and WiFi,) and I’m against net neutrality regulations.

Net neutrality sounds like it’s as wonderful as motherhood and organically-grown, fair-trade apple pie. We all want our Internet to be free, fair, and open, and nobody wants any heinous tollbooths in the Info Super Highway, gatekeepers in Cyberspace, or Big Brothers deciding what blogs we can read. If the issue were that simple there wouldn’t be a debate, net neutrality laws would pass both houses by acclamation and be signed by our President with flourish and fanfare and peace would rule the planet, etc.

But public policy is not so simple, especially in a case that involves the regulation of the single most complicated machine ever built, the Internet.

The Snowe-Dorgan and Markey Amendments contain a poison pill that will stifle the evolution of the Internet, in the form of a prohibition against a Quality of Service surcharge:

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.

The argument in favor of this provision says that it’s needed in order to prevent the formation of a two-tier Internet, where one tier has Quality of Service and the other doesn’t, and this is somehow bad for Daily Kos and Google.

This is a false claim, because the engineering math behind Quality of Service says it can’t be applied to every stream from every user. In Lake Woebegon all the children can be above average, but on the Internet all packets can’t.

We have a two-tier Internet today where commercial customers have a full range of service plans available to them, but consumers have a very limited menu. The provision would guarantee that the consumer menu will always be severely limited. We don’t need a single- or dual-tier Internet but a multi-tiered one where every new application can get the services it needs from the network and nobody has to pay for services they don’t want. As Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web said:

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.

That view cannot be reconciled with the provision cited.

Perhaps ironically, the old monopolists – AT&T, Verizon, Bell South – advocate expansion of consumer choice while the new monopolists – Google, et. al. – advocate for restriction of choice.

Consumers benefit from the choice that the Stevens Bill offers them, and I hope you will reverse your public position and reject the special-interest-benefiting amendments offered by the agents of the New Monopolists.

The Internet has never been regulated in the manner of the cited provision, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to bamboozle you. Don’t be misled.

In 2002, Internet framer Vint Cerf said: …we must dedicate ourselves to keeping the network unrestricted, unfettered and unregulated. That’s as true today as it was then.

Respectfully,

Richard Bennett

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.

Dear Neuts,

Telco abuse of Internet users is hypothetical, not real. There has only been one documented instance of arbitrary service blockage in the USA, the Madison River case which the FCC promptly stopped. In response to this case, they devised the “four freedoms”.

These principles are part of the COPE Act, which also gives the FCC the authority to levy fines up to $500,000 per infraction. The Stevens Senate bill directs the FCC to do a study of provider abuses and report back.

The sensible approach to regulation, in this sphere or in others, is to draft broad principles, set up an enforcement regime, and let case law evolve.

Once we see some actual abuse that isn’t covered by these provisions, Congress will still be in the business of drafting laws and we’ll be able to go ask for whatever approach is necessary to solve the real problems. What you people are proposing is pre-emptive legislation that will most likely do to the Internet what Bush’s pre-emptive war did to Iraq.

I appreciate your sentiments, and firmly believe that you have good intentions. But I’ve worked with legislative bodies before and have seen the unintended consequences that can flow from legislation that’s guided by too much emotion and not enough information.

There’s no immediate crisis here so the best thing course of action is to simply gather information. We all want a “neutral” network that enables innovation to flourish, and the fact that we’ve never really had one shouldn’t discourage us.

Networks are technical artifacts that improve with time, and even the Internet is not so perfect that we should freeze it.

In fact, the architects of the Internet made several design mistakes because of the model they chose to imitate, the early Ethernet. That system tried to do bandwidth management in a fully distributed manner with a clunky scheme of medium sensing, collision detection, and backoff. The Internet analogies are slow start, congestion, and backoff for TCP.

The early Ethernet model doesn’t work well under high load, and was abandoned in the late 80s after my colleagues and I on the IEEE 802.3 standards committee devised a scheme that ran Ethernet over twisted pair wiring into a hub or switch. It turns out that you can manage bandwidth better from a central point that knows who wants to do what when than you can in a totally random, distributed system. The system we devised is the Ethernet that we all use today.

When we re-designed the Ethernet, we faced the same aesthetic criticisms that the neutrality people are heaping on the phone companies today: our system wasn’t democratic, it wasn’t reliable, it couldn’t ensure fairness, and it wasn’t going to be cool with the FCC. But all those criticisms turned out to be groundless, and we now have 40 Gigabit Ethernet running on switch-based systems.

We fought the same battle when we designed the WiFi system. One faction wanted an Access Point-based system and another wanted an Aloha system that was fully distributed and all that. Once again, the network engineering work showed that an Access Point provided better performance to everyone than a distributed system that was constantly flailing for access to the network.

It’s about time that the architecture of the Internet was updated to reflect modern practices in network design where traffic is classified and moderated in points of intelligence that are distributed around the network. This sort of re-design, which was started by the MPLS and DiffServ people, will ultimately produce a network that can do more things better for more applications than the dated Vint Cerf design where the guy with the fattest pipe controls the network.

The original Interment was a fine piece of work given the limited knowledge of packet-switched networks in 1980, but we’ve learned a lot since then and consumers will benefit if some of this learning can be passed on the form of new networks with better performance and richer choices.

I think my networks are better than the old collision-based Ethernet that was the model for the TCP Internet, and a new Internet based on new LANs and WLANs would be better than the old one.

I’m biased, but so are that Cerf character and his fellow-traveler Sir Berners-Lee.

Whether you agree with me or not, I think the moral and decent thing to do is to offer consumers the opportunity to see which one they like better. That’s what we did with Ethernet, and the market responded strongly. There’s no shame in designing a system that works pretty well in its day but is ultimately replaced by a better one.

That’s the whole story of technology, so let’s not pre-judge the outcome.

Best wishes,

The Network Bunny

PS: Go read the Heritage Foundation’s paper on this question. It’s very edifying.

What’s really going on with “net neutrality” regulations is that the Big Content companies are afraid the Internet will become more a medium of communication than a means of delivering canned content, and that will eat away at their profits. So they’ve concocted this whole FUD campaign that dishonestly makes Quality of Service enhancements for communications applications a threat to web access.

The Internet is more than the Web, and beefing up the communications side makes the content less compelling. Instead of whining about the Telcos, Big Content should try to be more interesting.

The funny Flash ad for Hands Off the Internet singles out poor Alyssa Milano for abuse. It’s pretty well done.

In related news, Congress is considering hearings on Google’s click-fraud case. See the Google watchblog with the colorful name for info about Google’s multi-billion dollar fraud against small businesses. (And you thought they were the good guys? After China even? Dude, are you nuts?)