הנייטרליות ברשת הופכת לנושא החם בדיון הציבורי היום, על מה מדברים כאן בעצם? מי נגד מי? מהם הגבולות הפוליטיים ומה צריך לעשות כדי להזהר מסחטנו…

Also, consider that the costs of backbone bandwidth is dropping continuously. The “who pays for this playing field” is a very short term argument which will dissappear in under a decade.

Removing the right to unhindered connectivity will cost society more in the long run.

The current controversy over Internet regulation has been wildly distorted by a group of entrenched semi-monopolies (Google, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon) who don’t want to see any change in the playing field now that they’ve carved out the most profitable chunks.

The Telcos would like to upgrade their cable plants and offer services that can compete with the less-regulated cable companies, but they’re nervous because so many people seem to think that Broadband is a natural right, like free speech or something.

The Telcos figure they’ll offered tiered service, at one price for basic broadband and at a higher price for higher speed and lower delay. Nobody has a problem with that, as far as I can tell.

Where it gets controversial is that they’d like to make service bundles available, probably at intermediate prices, that give you the high-speed boost in certain applications and not in others. One example is some sort of VoIP service.

Now it seems to most of us that bundling is a pretty common practice and they ought to be able to do that, and it’s also reasonable to allow sites to subsidize the broadband used by their customers. It’s not really all that different from what Google and Microsoft and eBay do with advertising today, and it’s similar to what Google plans to do on their own broadband network, Muni WiFi with ads.

What’s good for Google is good for the Telcos, so it’s awfully hypocritical of them to be stirring up all this paranoia and getting so many simple-minded people nervous just to maintain their de facto monopoly on search. Maybe they should spend their money improving their search algorithms instead of trying to muscle the Congress around at their whim.

I’m no big fan of the Telcos, but in this instance they’re being a lot less evil than Google and their phony grass-roots coalition.

If this “next generation Internet” you keep talking about is ever going to become a reality, it’s going to have to incorporate not only IP QoS, but also multicast, broadcast, and non-IP transports; and ways will have to be found to achieve intercarrier peering of all these services. Unicast transmission of a dozen copies of a single video stream down the same DOCSIS channel, or twenty thousand copies from the same server farm, makes no worldly sense (no more than it did seven years ago when I built such a farm), but that’s what I more and more repeatedly hear the agitated masses calling upon Congress to enact into law.

The internet is not a publicly owned resource; it’s a retail business. ISPs buy bandwidth from backbone carriers at wholesale rates and resell it to consumers at a profitable markup. The fact that there’s an internet out there to connect to at all is made possible solely by cooperation among telecom companies.

We’ve already been through the age of segregated islands of online service. Minitel, Prodigy, Compuserve, and GEnie are all things of the past, and soon AOL as a proprietary dialup service will be too. The marketplace rejected these services when unhindered internet connectivity became available, and the marketplace will not go back.

Telecoms who degrade their current service offerings for the sake of priority traffic will soon find themselves out of the internet business. There’s no reason to do so; practically everyone in the backbone business has scads of dark fiber, and there’s actually bandwidth savings to be realized in building a more robust routing architecture; when video distribution can eventually be moved from unicast IP to multicast distribution, or to a cached CDN, gigabits per second of backbone bandwidth will be freed up for other applications.

As the number of applications of the World Wide Web continues to grow, the more it will become apparent that although IP is a truly wonderful technological achievement, it is not a magical panacea for all problems, all media, and all applications. Other transports and other means of resource access will have to be incorporated, and we can ill afford legislative nannying that shackles us to 1990s technology.

I was playing with Apple II’s in the early 80’s. I was working with TCP/IP stacks in 86 and started reading the usenet in 87. I know my history.

It was originally ARPAnet until 1971, and then changed to DARPAnet. It’s gone back and forth because ARPA and DARPA have been renamed several times.

Most people fail to understand the version of the Internet we currently use wasn’t started until about 1995, and that was because of several factors one of which was Al Gore’s pioneering efforts with the NSFnet.

Here some’s links that might illuminate you:

http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7gci213782,00.html — ARPAnet information Vint Cerf (Of course I know of Vint Cerf) in defense of Al Gore’s — http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200009/msg00052.html Wiki Information on the Internet — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HistoryoftheInternet (focus the NSFnet) Snopes on Al Gore — http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

While Al Gore didn’t “invent” (by the way that was something he never said) the Internet, he definitely had a hand in the creation from the original hand off ARPAnet to the NSFnet, and then in the second version with Bill Clinton in 1993 to hand off from the original NSFnet to businesses; and that is what it is today.

Even Microsoft acknowledge it:

“In 1991, Vice President Al Gore, then a U.S. senator, proposed widening the architecture of NSFNET to include more K-12 schools, community colleges, and 2-year colleges. The resulting legislation expanded NSFNET and renamed it NREN (National Research and Educational Network). This bill also allowed businesses to purchase part of the network for commercial uses. The mass commercialization of today’s Internet is the direct result of this legislation.”

One of my biggest gripes in the early 90’s was that I felt that we all deserved free access as the backbone was created with tax dollars.

PS: Owned!

The current internet is (mostly) first-come, first-served. Everyone waits their turn in line. The current fracas is about Whitacre et al. wanting to prioritize packets for a price. What that means to the rest of the net is that if you pay AT&T you can cut to the front of the line. Everyone else stays at the back of the line until all the “premium” customers move through.

The first-come, first-served internet incents a big overprovision of bandwidth so that there are few moments of bad congestion. Overprovision leads pretty quickly to falling prices. The Bells don’t like commodification.

The pay-to-cut-in-line version of the internet introduces an alternate way to make “monetize” the net: make the “best effort” internet so pokey or unpredictable (congested) that you can convert cheapo customers into more lucrative premium ones by NOT upgrading the net until you find the most profitable balance between premium and best effort parts of your income. Then you try and keep congestion at that level.

The dynamics of cut-in-line should scare us all regardless of our personal ideological flavor…it’s a recipie for making congestion profitable.

It’s not petty to work to get the grassroots stirred up about something like this. In the end congressfolk care most about being re-elected. Lobbyist money is a means to this end. It’s not a good argument that the web companies are lacking–its a means to catch the ear of the legislators. Because there is no way that any company can match the phone companies lobbying prowess at this time (that has to be developed over time) getting serious about passing legislation requires both public support and lobbying. Even the phone companies realize how vulnerable they are to grassroots outrage. The phone company funded astroturf organizations are an attempt to insulate legislators from legitimate grassroots anger. And that anger can defeat the Bells–that’s basically how BellSouth lost the fiber referendum vote in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Not fighting on both fronts is to conceed the battle.

However, Doc Searls and David Weinberger and I talked about this late last year in a series of podcasts and I came away hoping that capitalism will, in fact, save the day. If some telcos start screwing with open access to sites, then new players (Google, etc) will rise to fill the gap.

Still, we can’t sit around and live in blind faith that good will win out. We need to fight tooth and nail for the Net.

Wanna talk oil and gas now? Don’t get me mad!!