Father of Internet Warns Against Net Neutrality

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."

Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Kahn != Khan, so is the blurb talking about two different persons?

Re:I don't get it...

[AKAImBatman]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The FCC has already stated that they will fine any company that abuses their ability to Tier bandwidth. So we're covered on that front without having to pass new laws. At the same time, the current situtation allows for ISPs to use the tiering features of their routing equipment as it was originally designed: To provide near real-time routing for time-sensitive traffic such as Voice Over IP.

Sad - even PC gets Net Neutrality

[SpiceWare]

John Hodgman and Jon Stewart explain Net Neutrality [youtube.com]

I'm not looking forward to PneuMail.

Re:Yes, we should

[4e617474]

Did you sleep through Econ 101? That's called Allocative_efficiency via the Free Price System.

Did you sleep through the 90's? The reason every geek on Earth was excited about the Internet and extolled its virtues to a critical-mass of non-geeks was that it delivered information and innovation to you as fast as it could be generated, and by anyone who could express it - not that "goods and services" were being delivered.

Re:I don't get it...

[AKAImBatman]

Certainly:

http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/networkin frastructure/183701554 [networkcomputing.com]

Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin said that his agency has the authority to police any so-called net neutrality violations, both in the voice and video arenas.

In a question-and-answer period in front of the keynote audience, Martin said that "I do think the commission has the authority necessary" to enforce network neutrality violations, noting that the FCC had in fact done so in the case last year involving Madison River's blocking of Vonage's VoIP service.

"We've already demonstrated we'll take action if necessary," Martin said.

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.

Re:Not very convincing.

[ArcherB]

Granted, people in Idaho don't care about Chicago's toll roads until they have to pay more for a loaf of bread that had to travel through Chicago to get to their local store. And yes, since many companies like UPS has enormous hubs in Chicago, everything that passes through them gets more expensive. This means that the people in Hawaii are paying for Chicago's toll roads twice: Once because UPS pays local taxes for those roads and again when their trucks pay the toll to get from Midway Airport to the UPS hub.

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.

Re:Yes, we should

[ArcherB]

Did you sleep through Econ 101? That's called Allocative_efficiency via the Free Price System. The market price allocation of goods and services is the best that humankind has come up with in the last 4,000 years of recorded history, and the only one that matches production to demand, because it is the only scheme that accounts for human nature and motivations. Price allocation means people will pay for a good if the good is worth the price and other people will produce the good if the selling price is worth their efforts. Every other type of allocation scheme has brought woe and shortages.

If your content is "worthy", people will pay what it is worth to see it. The installed bandwidth will increase to meet the demand (absent any non-competative tinkering like monopolies or goverment franchises, which may be the problem here).

Actually, I did... and I got a B. I did stay awake through most of the stuff about monopolies and public utilities. I see the Internet as a public utility. I understand paying more for more usage, but I don't see giving my neighbor priority because he pays more. How 'bout if the utility company cut off only the poor neighborhoods in a brown out? A bit closer would be if the cable company blocked CNN because FoxNews paid for the bandwidth and the maximum number of people in my area were already watching CNN. So I have the option of watching FoxNews or nothing at all. Of course, FoxNews would get more viewers, meaning they could charge more from advertisers, so they could buy more bandwidth... and of course, CNN would not be able to get advertisers because they have no viewers. Now replace FoxNews with Google and CNN with Yahoo.

Re:Another question

[ReverendHoss]

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 healthy, even if you bathe less than your neighbor. Yes, some people may fill swimming pools and over water their lawns, but in the end, you are still better off. I've never had my house broken into, but I certainly don't begrudge those who have my tax dollars for funding a police force.

The government is a valid consumer group, and one whose buying power allows cheap procurement of goods and services that would be prohibitively expensive if offered on an individual basis. Certain investments in infrastructure are what provide a reasonable society for other businesses to continue. I haven't decided on which side of the Net Neutrality divide I'm coming down on, but the idea that non-drivers are getting nothing in exchange for their tax dollars is just plain wrong.

Re:Andrew Orlowski

[Aire Libre]

Yes. I listened to what he said, and then read the article -- the guy got it wrong, wrong, wrong. What I heard him say is that net neutrality is defined by diffferent people different ways, and if you define it one way -- to mean nothing interesting can happen and no innovation can take place unless it is on the Internet -- then he is against it. He believes people ought to be free to develop innovative things on their own LANs, but if they use the Internet for it then everyone else should be able to participate in it (which is what others mean by net neutrality, though he did not say that), otherwise, you have fragmentation (he said that), which he opposes. For a lot of people, that "fragmentation" is precisely what net neutrality seeks to avoid. The DPS project (which supports a particular brand of net neutrality) would seem to get a boost from his speech, but for people who misrepresent his position as being in favor of Internet privatization and fragmentation -- which is not "the Internet" at all, and which he opposed. He is all for net neutrality if you define it as does the DPS Project, http://www.dpsproject.com/ [dpsproject.com].

Re:i have to agree

[kmweber]

Nope.

One's rights are an inherent fact of one's existence as a human being.

They are static and universal, and their existence or extent is not subject to government fiat.

The only variable is the extent to which governments choose to respect those rights.

Re:internet regulations

[falconwolf]

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

Re:I guess I get it,...

[jc42]

... the invention of a network protocol doesn't mean you automatically have some inspirational insight into the future governance of something which affects the daily lives of people worldwide.

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.

Re:internet regulations

[Emperor Cezar]

An RFC is a request for comment. The difference between a standard and a regulation is that the motivation of a standard is to make you life/job easier and better. The motivation of a regulation is to get a politician re-elected, or to help stuff to pockets of hit buddies.