“I appreciate your desire for linguistic exactitude, David. When an engineer uses a term, it has a much narrower scope than it does when a policy advocate uses the same term. The scope differences in such terms as “discrimination” has kept the debate over Internet regulation alive far beyond its useful life.

“However, I find a great deal of inexactitude in your post once you get off the broadband vs. Internet point. You say, for example: “The Internet was designed to work over any kind of network, and it works over mobile broadband platforms today!”

“What do you mean by “was designed?” Do you mean there was a hope, or a goal, or an intention to make the Internet work over networks that didn’t exist in 1974, or that everything needed to ensure it would work was done in the beginning?

“And what do you mean by “work?” Do you mean “stumble along, losing every other packet and sucking down an enormous electrical load but more or less connecting everyone to everyone as long as nobody’s in a hurry” or do you mean “functions efficiently across the broadest conceivable range of applications and networks, promotes innovation and investment, and costs next to nothing to operate?”

“These terms are also important elements of the debate over broadband and Internet regulation, and need to be precisely defined as well.”
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David Reed is barking up the wrong tree. The debate over Internet regulation is not a question of hair-splitting and semantics, it’s a policy debate about who regulates the Internet, how much power the regulator has, and in what direction we want the regulator to push it. These questions fundamentally need to be resolved by Congress, and there’s much more at stake than simple definitions.

Incidentally, Reed is acknowledged to have played a part in the decision to separate TCP from IP in 1978, and has played no discernible role in the development of networking technology since then, so you’ve overstated his credentials just a bit.