Slashdot Log In
Father of Internet Warns Against Net Neutrality
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jan 22, 2007 03:54 PM
from the my-two-dads dept.
from the my-two-dads dept.
An anonymous reader writes "At a recent talk at the Computer History Museum Robert Kahn, co-inventor of TCP/IP, warned against net neutrality legislation that could hinder experimentation and innovation. Calling 'net neutrality' a slogan, Khan also cautioned against 'dogmatic views of network architecture.' A video of the talk is also available."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
I don't get it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't get it... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) ISPs: Extra cash.
2) Big companies: Lock out potential competitors. (4 Seconds Loading Time Is Maximum For Websurfers [slashdot.org])
Parent
I guess I get it,... (Score:5, Interesting)
We have lived during a rare time, when such a powerful medium has somehow managed to keep from being completely commercialized past any recognition of the fragile and open universe it was for its first decade. There may be no way to stop the dictates of the almighty "marketplace" from having its way with the Internet like a brute with a virgin child, but I give credit to those who are trying to think of ways to keep it free for a few more years.
If we ever see the full-out commercialization and commoditization of the 'net, we will have lost something precious - something that made the turn of the millennium a great time to be alive.
Parent
internet regulations (Score:3, Insightful)
We have lived during a rare time, when such a powerful medium has somehow managed to keep from being completely commercialized past any recognition of the fragile and open universe it was for its first decade. There may be no way to stop the dictates of the almighty "marketplace" from having its way with the Internet like a brute with a virgin child, but I give credit to those who are trying to think of ways to keep it free for a few more years.
And it's amazing all this happened while the internet was un
Re:internet regulations (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazing how all the cable people required monopolies to run cable but no one needed a monopoly to run high speed internet.
Parent
Re:internet regulations (Score:5, Informative)
And it's amazing all this happened while the internet was unregulated. Imagne what would of happened if it had been regulated.
Pretty easy... just look at cable TV.
Amazing how all the cable people required monopolies to run cable but no one needed a monopoly to run high speed internet.
Actually companies did need, er used a, monopoly to offer broadband. Except for Wifi, WiMAX, ie all landline providers do have monopolies by which they are able to offer broadband. This is true whether the ISP is cable or telco. The only way these companies would be willing to spend all the money to build the infrastructer was if they were granted exclusive rights. They have however outlived their purpose. To tell the truth, though I am a Libertarian, I believe local infrastructure should be locally owned. Either government, coop, or some local organization. The IEEE's Spectrum has a good article on how some communites in northeastern Utah are creating "A Broadband Utopia" [ieee.org]. I'd like to see more things like this. Falcon
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
An engineer is not an economist. You shouldnt have to apologize when you see an expert use his weight in one field to push his opinions in another. He is at fault here.
Re:I guess I get it,... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I guess I get it,... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, there's a fairly obvious argument saying that the invention of such a protocol does imply such an insight.
We can see the natural state of a network without global "regulation" (i.e., standards) by looking at networking equipment invented by manufacturers. We call these LANs now, because they're only workable on a very local level. The reason is that no two of them can interoperate. Corporations don't communicate with their competitors, and they intentionally build equipment that won't talk to their competitors' equipment. The only way to get a world-wide network is to have some sort of governing body that can decree and enforce standards. Otherwise, all you get is a lot of non-cooperating, small-scale networks.
You can see the difficulty especially well with the cell-phone system. That has the potential to be a universally-accessible world-wide wireless comm system. But it hasn't much happened, because governments (especially the US government) allow the companies to control their own networks. Their natural behavior is to restrict their networks to "locked" equipment that you must buy from them, and which can't communicate well with the competition even when it's the same brand of phone. They also take great pains to prevent us independent software developers from building anything on their networks, because they don't want anything on their network that doesn't directly result in income to them.
There was a great deal of insight in the creation of the Internet. Especially impressive is the way that they found to use the limited, proprietary systems, by encapsulating them and building a higher-level layer of software that hid all the low-level incompatibilities. This is the primary value of the IP protocol. And they made all their specs and most of the code freely available to all developers, which produced the explosion of user applications of the past couple decades.
It took insight to appreciate that the commercial world would never do such a thing, so they needed an approach that could use commercial products while insulating the proprietary details from applications. The result was a system that actually encourages communication between unlike hardware from different manufacturers, something that those manufacturers still try to block when they can.
We should give credit where credit is due here.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Funny)
You've been to New York too?
Parent
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it would not be a good idea.
However, is Network Neutrality simply the inverse set of the scheme you refer to, or is it an over-the-top reaction that actually bans many quite legitimate activities an ISP might do (such as providing bandwidth over and above what an end user has paid for, to paying parties. ie you pay for a 256k connection, but it becomes a 1Mbps + 256k connection whenever Apple is sending data to it, because they paid.)
My reading of network neutrality is it makes all forms of improved service in exchange for money illegal, even when the end user doesn't lose out because of it. I'd rather see lobbying for minimum guaranteed service levels than "neutrality", the Internet equivalent of banning 1-800 numbers.
Parent
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. ISPs maintain the same level of service they do now, and allow some sites to pay more for a faster pipe to you.
2. ISPs cut your default service to squat, and make sites pay for anything resembling decent bandwidth.
Pieces of evidence to consider: N.N. wasn't even an issue until certain ISPs figured they could extort money out of sites like Youtube (which use a lot of bandwidth). Number 2 is cheaper.
What it comes down to it, your broadband ISP sold you an always-on connection that runs at >= 1Mbps but they aren't remotely capable of delivering it if everyone starts doing more than burst-type downloads. And now rather than own up to this mistake, they want to make the guys who made their error apparent (streaming video) pay. ISPs are corporations, which means that they don't care if it will destroy the Internet as we know it, because it's cheaper.
I'd be more than willing to bet that if legislation requiring minimum service levels passes, we'll see the minimum service level drop to squat, and anyone wanting decent bandwidth pays anyway.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
These both amount to the same thing when you take into account that as time goes on, bandwidth for a given price should increase: the definition of "decent bandwidth" will change over time. Net Neutrality seeks to prevent ISPs from freezing the quality of their infrastructure and forcing
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be just fine, IF I had a choice of more than two packages from more than two broadband pr
Re:I don't get it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds pretty harmless when you're talking about Joe Tiny ISP. It's these big guys that start to give you the willies when you think about the implications of it. Net Neutrality in its purest form is somewhat of a myth these days anyway, given that almost no one runs a perfectly open router. We all firewall, we all segment and exclude, etc, etc, etc. Prioritization of packets is a natural next step in that chain. It just urks me that some PHB got the idea to make that into a profiteering mechanism, so now prioritization is evil, and will either be abused, or outlawed.
The absurdity of it all abounds. Packet prioritization is not evil unto itself. I guess if I started squelching any and all requests from microsoft.com and msn.com but gave high priority to google.com....pfft, this is all insane.
Parent
Re:I don't get it... (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, prioritizing ComCast VOIP service over Vonage VOIP service.
Or prioritizing video.cnn.com over video.google.com
Parent
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty sure the answer there is no and no. Don't even get me started on how hard it is to define abuse.
Not that I disagree with the notion... I'd rather not let the government get any more involved in our Internet than they already are. I just don't trust the FCC any more than legislators or big ISPs.
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
They can do that now, and they can do that after Net Neutrality is passed. It seems that most of the complaints (on both sides) are about what they think could happen (but is illegal before and after, or legal before and after), not what is actually changed by it. About the only thing done now that *might* be illegal after would be restricting of P2P and servers housed in people's homes. My reading of the bill would make DNS filters and SMTP filters designed to stop DDOS and spam illegal. However, since these can affect performance for all and are not legal otherwise, those restrictions could probably remain, though a court would probably have to be consulted.
If you have a problem with the bill, please point me to the section you have an issue with. If you don't know the section you don't like, then you obviously don't know enough about it to object. The particular part I don't like is that many CLECs could be put out of business with Section 12 (d) of the draft bill. Oh, all right, here is one place you can take a look at a draft: http://dorgan.senate.gov/documents/newsroom/net_n
Parent
Re:I don't get it... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/networki
Note that the paragraph about "tiered services" is poorly worded by the article. The author of the article for some reason is creating confusion by also referring to different levels of bandwidth availability (e.g. purchasing 768K at $20/mo vs. paying $40 for 1.5M) as "tiering". So read it carefully.
Parent
Re:I don't get it... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying someone can go to Ford or Honda and buy up all the cars, and thus deprive all others of automobiles.
It won't work for the simple reason that Ford and Honda can make more.
No one will pay big money to monopolize all the bandwidth, because the more money they spend trying to do it, the more incentive there is for providers to make more.
And keep in mind that it's easy right now to choke off bandwidth. Simply open a huge number of simultaneous TCP connections to overwhelm all others. All other things being equal, if someone has 1 TCP connection moving data and another person has 16 TCP connections, the latter person will grab 16/17ths of the bandwidth.
Or maybe recruit thousands of zombie computers to ping flood a destination IP in a DoS attack. In effect network neutrality means those with the most bandwidth and most servers will win.
One solution to these problems would be to set up queues for all destination IPs and use prioritization to implement fair-queuing. The only trouble is that, under certain net neutrality proposals like that of Markey, fair-queuing would actually be illegal since it uses a prioritization scheme not among those allowed.
Think about that. It would actually be illegal in to fairly allocate bandwidth.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's like someone buying up all the lanes on the freeway and then dictating who can drive and how fast. And they wouldn't even have to buy all the roads, just a few "choke points". Actually, a bit more accurate would be that a company would pay the "road-company" to dictate who can drive what, to where and how fast. Of course, as each company owns different stretches of roads, I see
Re:Another question (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, We, as in WE the People who vote.
Governments, like it or not, are in the best position to provide certain services like roads, water, sewage, defense and so on. If private industries take over these services, bad things happen, like toll roads, dumped sewage and dirty water. Governments are wasteful because they are not bound by profit. Wasteful includes things like repairing roads that are still passable, but need repair and treating sewage before dumping it back into the water supply, even though it is expensive.
Parent
Re:Another question (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not a democracy, or at least it's not supposed to be. People who vote don't have the authority to dictate arbitrary terms to other people, except where specified in a constitution.
Okay, you get some of your infrastructure (water, sewage) from the city. How does that translate into the Feds running the Internet again?
Parent
Re:Not very convincing. (Score:5, Informative)
This is not about the end-user paying more for faster Internet service. This is about companies paying line owners to give their traffic priority. While a Comcast customer may not want to pay for blazing speed, they shouldn't have to wait longer or pay a toll when their web browsing takes them off of Comcast's lines and onto AT&T's. Internet lines are rarely local.
Finally, packets will follow the path of least resistance. This means that if Google pays gets priority for Time Warner's lines, most non-Google traffic will be routed around Time Warner, congesting AT&T's lines until AT&T starts giving priority to Yahoo, congesting everyone else s's lines further, which means that my slashdot post will get bogged down.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt there is any way to avoid being a user of any road in a major city. Even if you don't drive on it. Your neighborhood Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and grocery store (or local equivalants) all depend on easy, low-cost transportation of goods. Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, garbage trucks, and all manner of services that keep a city going depend on these roads, something that you benefit from even if you don't even own a car.
Having easy, cheap access to clean water keeps the community as a whole h
Re:Another question (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there is the public safety factor. Everyone benefits from the fact that firetrucks can quickly reach a fire and put it out before it damages other property. Everyone benefits when police can quickly reach the scene of a crime. Everyone benefits from the fact that, with an efficient transport network, we can defend out territory with a smaller military.
By refusing to pay taxes that go towards roads, YOU are the freeloader. Roads represent an externality, a public good. The free market does not deal with externalities efficiently. Ignoring the public good, roads have utility X. People will pay Y for that utility, and the amount they are willing to pay determines the number and quality of roads available. This will be less than the optimal number and quality of roads, because the true utility of roads includes the externalities that can not be accounted for in market transactions.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes, we should (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition, the system has well known modes of failure. Natural monopolies, imbalance of information, and externalities all cause the market to fail to rpovide optimal distribution of resources. The best system we have come up with in the past 4,000 years is one that includes some level of government regulation of trade. Even Adam Smith realized that, in order to remain free, the market must be regulated. Read Wealth of Nations.
All in all, the free market is a remarkeably effective system. But that system is known to fail in certain circumstances, and thus, a larger system incorporated managed oversight of the market through elected representatives has proven to be the most effective. Lassez Faire failed as badly as communism.
Parent
Man (Score:5, Funny)
new markets for tunnels (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder, if net neutrality falls apart, and we end up with people charging more for high-speed pipes to certain places, will that generate a big boom in building VPN/GRE/IP tunnels to attempt to work around it? If so, that could become a very lucrative business for Cisco or any other tunnel-equipment maker/provider. Hmmm..makes me wonder if there is a new conspiracy about to brew....
- E
Main Point (Score:5, Insightful)
Unintended Consequences (Score:4, Insightful)
A law is advocated to stop behaviour some people see as undesireable. The perpetrators have no such opinion. Whatever impels them to do the undesireable act continues to operate, and they just find a way around.
On net neutrality, in a competitive market, premium services will result in lower prices for bulk services. What do I care about 2000 ms latency when I'm downloading ISOs? I just increase RWIN.
Breaking a forerunner of "net neutrality" is how the Internet got it's international costs so low. Going from channel-switched [voice] to packet-switched [data].
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of this: You have a big pipe CAPABLE of total 2 MiB/s up and down. You could section that off so that you have
The key would be if YOU could control your OWN QoS, not if the companies force it towards you....
well (Score:5, Funny)
Well, as a genetically engineered superhuman, you might want to listen to him. He's a lot smarter than you.
Father of Internet?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, how does this make him the "Father of the Internet"?
Co-inventor of TCP/IP, OK, but "Father of the Internet"?!? What about the CERN guys, what about the router folks, what about the...everyone else who co-invented a piece of technology that enabled the existence of the internet?
Just ranting because I'm kind of sick of hyperbole.
Does kahn host his own servers at home? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
If anything, I would think that allowing corporate entities to throttle bandwidth for whichever site or service they choose, then hold that service's customer availability up for ransom would do far more damage to "encouraging capabilities" and "inventivize innvation". After all, money that might have gone into R&D from these companies (see: Google, Microsoft) might have to be used just so they aren't impeded from their customer.
It would also stall innovation on the end of ISPs- if they note that their current systems can't handle traffic from a certain site or service, they just throttle back that site/service, make them cough up dough, then use that dough to get more systems to handle the bandwidth (or just release the throttle, upgrade nothing, and screw the consumers; depends on which ISP we're talking about). So instead of handling it with improvements, they'll just look to throw more money for more of the same solution. (Which, granted, could be what they do now.)
Perhaps he's saying that the government shouldn't get involved on pro- or con-neutrality, which I can understand more, but then that opens the door for the greedy corporations to start throttling away.
A side thought on net neutrality: If an ISP decides to limit access to such sites as Microsoft.com, thereby hampering the Windows Update service, and the computers that can't get updated turn into botboxes (for spam or virii- or both), would the ISP then be liable for any damage caused by the spam/virii?
Listen to your father (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to change the debate (Score:5, Insightful)
But the central issue already has a name--it's called "common carrier." ISPs need to be held to a standard that is content- and author-neutral. My Web site or e-mail or video should not be able to be blocked or slowed based simply on what it says or who wrote it. I don't care about the technology that gets it there--just get it there and don't let me be discriminated against.
Common carrier is so important, and so ingrained in our way of thinking, that to some people it's impossible to imagine that it can't exist. But the fact is that it must be specified by legislation, and right now for Internet services it is not. This is the essence of the issue.
Network protocols, frankly, are not. The network protocols used on telephone and cell phone networks change all the time, but the right to have your call delivered remains. Trucks and tracking technology are improved all the time, but the right to have your package delivered has not changed in over 100 years. There is no shortage of models for how common carrier can be enforced without hindering innovation.
Don't Legislate (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, I believe the only reason the issue is so important is because too many things have already been written into law. Specifically, existing laws make it difficult to set up ones own telecom operation. This is what makes the incumbents so powerful, and this is why we need to be worried about them locking people out or providing suboptimal service.
If the barriers to entry were lower, perhaps we could have different carriers for different niches, rather than what is basically a yes/no proposition.
If you _really_ want to know my opinion about whether there should be net neutrality or not, I would say there has never been, nor will there ever be net neutrality. There are always some who get better service than others, even if nobody is making a specific effort to make it that way. While I think ensuring everyone can have a certain minimum level of access to information has some merit, network neutrality is either a misnomer or taking things waaaaay too far.
Sad - even PC gets Net Neutrality (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not looking forward to PneuMail.
Other Warnings (Score:3, Funny)
I saw TFV... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm with him on the latter, but I fail to see where or how any commercial entity operating for profit will care anything about the network's integrity if they can make profit from limiting the performance of others. "Competition" is often defined in exactly that way, after all.
Ultimately, it comes down to either trusting commercial, for-profit entities not to interfere with internet traffic at large or legislating a prohibition against such activity. Ideally, any such legislation should essentially say "innovate all you like, but you cannot reduce the performance of competing traffic." Wisdom illustrates that no commercial can be trusted not to interfere with competing business without requirement of contract or law.
Is Kahn That Naive, Or Paid To Seem So? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's common practice for various industries to sponsor economists, attorneys, academics, and engineers at non-profit think tanks, so it would be all too easy to suspect a hidden agenda in this case. However, a few minutes of Googling Mr. Kahn and the CNRI didn't turn up a smoking gun, so it may be that he's just being native about the market conditions.
Re:Confused (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Finally someone gets it (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true. The regional broadband duopolies can do far more to hamstring innovation than net neutrality legislation would*. For example, with net neutrality, anybody is free to innovate in the fields of VoIP and VoD. But if the broadband companies had their druthers, they'd be the only providers of those services to their customers. How does that help innovation?
* Yes, it's possible to craft legislation that would do more to hamstring innovation and then label it "net neutrality", but then, at its core, it wouldn't strictly be net neutrality legislation.
Parent
Re:Neutrality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Neutrality? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, so long as it is all game traffic, not just whoever's game traffic a man-in-the-middle ISP decides to grant low latency.
Yes, so long as it is for all VOIP systems, not just the one offered by an ISP.
Not particularly, since I don't use my ISP's mail servers.
I'm fine with that...
...except that ISPs are suing to block muni broadband. As far as I'm concerned, if there's a way to build an Internet that bypasses ISP stupidity as needed, ISPs can be stupid. But, if ISPs are going to block build-outs like muni broadband, then the ISPs have to follow a code of conduct (e.g., "common carrier") that offers a level playing field to all. They can't have their cake ("we'll charge arbitrary content providers arbitrary amounts or turn off the tubes") and eat it too ("and no, you can't stop us by building a municipal network").
Parent