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."

I don't get it...

So we should allow the highest bidder to choke off the bandwidth from their less wealthy competitors? Honestly, can someone explain to me how this would be a good idea?

Re:I don't get it...

It's a good idea for two groups:

1) ISPs: Extra cash.
2) Big companies: Lock out potential competitors. (4 Seconds Loading Time Is Maximum For Websurfers [slashdot.org])

I guess I get it,...

With all due respect to Mr.Kahn, who I am told invented TCP/IP: Just why should we give any weight to his notion of the best way to keep the Internet from becoming just another channel for corporate interests, instead of the wide-open agora of information and ideas that it has become.

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.

Re:internet regulations

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.

Re:internet regulations

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,...

With all due respect to Mr.Kahn, who I am told invented TCP/IP: Just why should we give any weight to his notion of the best way to keep the Internet from becoming just another channel for corporate interests

Absolutely. Let's face it, although it's a widely used standard, without which the internet wouldn't function, 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.

Re:I guess I get it,...

... 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:I don't get it...

Now you fly out to a city; you immediately get stopped because you need to pay for the roads and streets even if you are not native to that city. Now you are told you have to walk slower because your friend that you came to visit didn't pay extra for your trip.

You've been to New York too?

Re:Another question

Who is "we", and who put "we" in the position of being in charge of what everybody else can do? If "we" is the government, I think "we the people" can count on them botching being in charge of the Internet.

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.

Re:Another question

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?

Re:Not very convincing.

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:Another question

Roads are a public good. You benefit from them whether you use them or not. Look at anything in your home or office, and chances are that it was transported via road many, many times during it's journey from raw resource to finished product. Everyone benefits from the increase in trade. Roads help goods move faster, faster moving goods means an economy that grows faster.

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.

Re:I don't get it...

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.

Re:I don't get it...

Which of these do you think is more likely to happen if Net Neutrality is broken:

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.

Re:I don't get it...

Meh. This is always a mess. From the ISP side, unless I have a business connection or the rare "clueful end user", I do traffic shaping on all connections, basically tossing p2p to the bottom of the stack, VOIP and video services to the top, and everything else to the middle. Now the kicker of Net Neutrality is that *technically*, I become a bad guy if I do this. It's entirely possible for me to decide that someone has paid me additional funds (say the local tv station) to prioritize their video feed above others to make sure it gets a nice clear picture, vs their competitors video feeds.

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.

Re:I don't get it...

Prioritization is not inherently bad. Whats bad is prioritizing within the same network protocols.

For example, prioritizing ComCast VOIP service over Vonage VOIP service.
Or prioritizing video.cnn.com over video.google.com

Re:I don't get it...

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.

Re:I don't get it...

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:I don't get it...

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.

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_ne utrality.pdf [senate.gov] (yes, it's a PDF) Now read it and tell me what in particular you think will bring the Internet to its knees, or shut up (and no, this isn't specifically aimed at the parent, but anyone out there talking about it without knowing what it is).

Re:Yes, we should

The current economic system does not account for human nature. It assumes humans are driven by pure self interest. Modern economic research shows that people are more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity. This research (google "fairness reciprocity economic research") shows that most people act fairly when they have the ability to punish unfairness or non-cooperation. The entire system is based on a falsehood and promotes selfishness by assuming it.

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.

Re:I don't get it...

So we should allow the highest bidder to choke off the bandwidth from their less wealthy competitors?

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.

Confused

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

Re:Confused

Either way, by supporting net neutrality, you will likely incur his wrath.

Man

Fuck the internet, I'm going back to throwing rocks with notes attached.

new markets for tunnels

    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

I don't think he's against neutrality, just legislation as a means to enforce it. Because, then, if someone does come up with a better system later, it will be hard to implement. However, the telecom's current proposal isn't really better, and does need to be dealt with somewhere.

Unintended Consequences

Agreed on the difficulty/undesireablity of legislation: it almost always has unexpected and unintended consequences are people adapt.

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].

well

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.

Well, as a genetically engineered superhuman, you might want to listen to him. He's a lot smarter than you.

Father of Internet?!?

...Robert Kahn, co-inventor of TCP/IP...

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.

Finally someone gets it

He's right! Any legislation will hurt the ability of people to innovate. What he missed is the biggest reason to oppose net neutrality legislation ... any legislation is another step to the government fully regulating and controling the Internet. This is something we must avoid at all costs. So far we've been lucky that the government hasn't come in and totally regulated it. We've got to work to push back what it does control now.

Re:Finally someone gets it

Any legislation will hurt the ability of people to innovate.

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.

Does kahn host his own servers at home?

Wouldn't net neutrality help to stop the ridiculous arbitrary blocking of ports that many ISPs impose, which basically keeps people from using the Internet as it was intended?

I'm confused

Perhaps I don't understand "Net Neutrality" as well as I thought, but Kahn's (KAAAAAAHHHHNN) statements confuse me.

"If the goal is to encourage people to build new capabilities, then the party that takes the lead is probably only going to have it on their net to start with and it's not going to be on anyone else's net. You want to incentivize people to innovate, and they're going to innovate on their own nets or a few other nets,"

"I am totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net," he said.

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

I agree with this guy. We can't even begin to imagine what our children are going to invent after growing up in this early phase of the internet culture. I, for one, am not excited about letting the geriatric politicos shackle our kids from innovating in ways we cannot anticipate today.

Neutrality....

Just wanted to let everyone know, I'm totally neutral on how to spell the guy's name....


(FFS, it's spell two different ways in the f%cking blurb!)

Ahem

KHAAAAAAAAAAN!

Note to editors: the man's name is Kahn, you misspelled it in the second to last sentance.

Time to change the debate

Net neutrality IS just a slogan, and not a very good one because it means different things to different people. To Robert Kahn it obviously means locking network protocols, which obviously he is against.

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.

Odds

100:1 On an Al Gore Joke
6000:1 On a "Kahhhhhhhn!" Posting

Anybody want to post over/unders for number of posts on above subjects?

So much cliche fodder in one article.

Don't Legislate

My stance is that, since the experts are disagreeing over the issue, the worst thing to do is to write something into law.

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.

Who is the babies daddy?

Seriously, who is the "father" of the Internet. You have the guy who developed HTML, you have everyone who worked on ARPANET, you have everyone who worked on TCP/IP. So who is the father? People need to stop using the name father to refer to people who were in on the early development of the Internet. It is confusing. Besides this guy is an engineer. What does he know about regulation and best business practices?

Sad - even PC gets Net Neutrality

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

I'm not looking forward to PneuMail.

Neutrality?

This came up last time I was following a Net Neutrality-related thread. I'm not sure everyone is using the same definition of NN. The definition I generally go by is that Net Neutrality would force ISPs (at all tiers) to offer their full resources to everyone. That is, they cannot give any certain clients/sites preferential treatment. Imagine if "the tubes" were all clogged up with tons of traffic - the companies that paid their ISP a "protection fee" would see their packets moving before the rest of the 'Net.

Using this definition, I am very confused, as I would expect Kahn to support this type of thing. He talks about innovation a lot. I always thought the prevailing consensus was that if ISPs have their way and quash NN, little companies would be effectively "locked out" of the Internet.

Am I wrong here?

Re:Neutrality?

You want low latency in your game traffic? How about smooth VoIP conversations? Would you like your ISP to block the spambot from filling your email with nonsense? There are good reasons for prioritization and blocking, none of which any of our current legislators can comprehend. Please keep them out of the decision making process and let ISPs run their business. If you don't like your ISP's policies, find another. If you have no choice, go talk to your local city council about laying municipal fiber and you'll have plenty of choices when that is done. If they don't listen to you, move to a city that is in the 21st century.

Re:Neutrality?

You want low latency in your game traffic?

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.

How about smooth VoIP conversations?

Yes, so long as it is for all VOIP systems, not just the one offered by an ISP.

Would you like your ISP to block the spambot from filling your email with nonsense?

Not particularly, since I don't use my ISP's mail servers.

Please keep them out of the decision making process and let ISPs run their business.

I'm fine with that...

If you have no choice, go talk to your local city council about laying municipal fiber and you'll have plenty of choices when that is done.

...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").

Wow he really gets around

And just when you thought he was going to be campaigning global warming for the rest of his career, here comes the father of the internet, Al Gore to warn us about this disastrous net neutrality!

Other Warnings

And the mother of the internet warns that the internet better get this room cleaned up and that trash taken out before its father gets home, young man.

Net Neutrality Question

When people talk about Net Neutrality, do they mean ISPs can't do any packet shaping at all?

I am, for example, all for ISPs giving lower priority to VOIP if they need to. What I am not OK with is some VOIP company paying an ISP to give them greater priority priority, while the company that can not afford to pay gets shafted.

Working in this article like "the ability of systems engineers to improve latency and jitter issues" make it sounds like no packing shaping at all is allowed. Is that right?

Khan!!!!

You've killed my Internet, you Klingon bastard!

Priorities

We have to have some priorities here. The telecoms want to charge content providers *now* and want to push independent publishers in an invisible slow tier *now*. So we need a solution to this.

And we also have this concern that a bill would hinder eventually, at some point, innovation.

Well here what: there's tons of innovation to be done that won't be against a law mandating net neutrality. We have a solution that works, is neutral and can be improved hell of a lot, before we hit some eventual obstacle to further innovation.

So I say: let's solve the issue at hand, and when this hypothetical so-much-better and incompatible with neutrality network is invented, we can change the law and adapt to it.

I mean, putting a law doesn't set it in stone. Even the constitution can be amended or altered if changes in our reality demand so. It's stupid not to take the obvious steps and save what we have right now, only because we've not yet found the absolutely perfect solution.

There's no absolutely perfect solution. There's just people who realize we need one, and people who wanna argue about it forever.

I saw TFV...

And what I get is two answers, that in my view are opposing. On one hand, he says he thinks "the net" should flourish with innovation, not just on the edges of the net, where things have traditionally happened, but inside the net as well. And then he goes on to say that he's opposed to anything that fragments or otherwise exclude players in the net.

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.

Read it first

http://dorgan.senate.gov/documents/newsroom/net_ne utrality.pdf [senate.gov]

Read the draft rather than just guessing. If you have a problem with it, then you should be able to list the specific section you don't like, and "all of it" isn't an answer. Let's debate what's actually out there, not someone else's summary of it.

Andrew Orlowski

The article is by Andrew Orlowski, the same guy that reported that Jimmy Wales was dead [theregister.co.uk] as part of his ongoing attack on Wikipedia, printed fabricated e-mails [thomashawk.com], and otherwise upheld the fine standards of Register journalism.

Has anyone actually listened to the audio to hear what Kahn actually said?

--MarkusQ

Hmm..

I thought Al Gore was too busy with Global Warming to comment on Net Neutrality.

Is Kahn That Naive, Or Paid To Seem So?

Mr. Kahn seems to be completely overlooking the fact that ownership of the national network backbones is very concentrated, and that these owners are pushing hard to use their virtual monopoly position to maximize ROI. They have no incentive or stated intention of innovating or adding significantly more capacity until they've rung every last dollar out of what they've got.

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.

everyone talking has a huge conflict of interest

Tech people are most likely the 5% of the people flooding the internet with P2P traffic which consumes 50% of bandwidth. Network neutrality is your (very targeted) subsidy, Why would anyone reading slashdot be against it?

The problem has a root

The issue is that providers have oversold bandwidth, and are now afraid that one day, people are going to start to actually use the bandwidth, and they will be exposed. The issue here is that they were relying on favourable contention ratios, but when people actually start to download those movies, there will be problems.

Because bandwidth ill now be shown to be more scarce that believed, the price is going to go up. However, I do not think there is any need for net neutrality for this to occur. It is simple supply and demand. ISPs should be made to deliver what they promise. If they say I have 10Mbps upstream, then if someone is trying to download from me from elsewhere, then he better be able to get 10Mbps from me, assuming his downstream matches. They should just price accordingly.

Mass Confusion

As the dude said the issue is not about net neutrality at all. It's about people not understanding whats important in the evolution of a such a system, the whole of the Internet must not fragment if it to grow as one, but at the same time if it is to grow at all, it needs crazy ppl doing crazy things that may isolate them more from the rest of the net. The point is to make it easier for the rest of the ppl to find these unknown few, other wise growth will be slow due to self imposed fragmentation. Think of it as mutation in a collections of cells, the most important type of mutation in this case is one which changes how the cells interact, however since we don't know what each cell is gonna do, we don't know the result of the mutation. we can only try it and hope for the best. but on the scale of the Internet this must happen naturally. and must not be suddenly forced on every single element of the system. Since in the case it is a 'bad' mutation the system cannot evolve to get rid of it, since no since cell has the original form any more, thus there is nothing to compare it to, to know if it is better or worse.

old news?

i think ive seen this article or several articles like it, once every other week, for the past 6 months.

if this were an image board id be posting the dead horse.

My concerns with Net Neutrality

Disclosure: I currently work at a telco albeit a very, very small one in a remote corner of Alaska. I used to work at a marginally larger telco, also in Alaska.

The idea that sparked net neutrality is good: having an ISP extort money from Google, Youtube, MySpace, etc. is a Bad Thing (tm). The Internet was built on open standards, and in the spirit that built the Internet, ISP's should work together to make the Internet as useful as possible. I really don't want to see turf wars between Verizon and Vonage (as an example) break out across the net. And, especially in rural areas, you can't really count on market forces to sort things out, since there may not be a competitor that you can switch to. I know in some areas where my employer provides Internet services, there aren't any realistic alternatives.

However, I have yet to see a network neutrality proposal that is able to discriminate between reasonable prioritization and abuse by the ISP. For example, the company I work for provides class-of-service to customers who need a priority bad enough to pay for a top-tier service. We have a customer that provides telemedicine to rural areas, using VVoIP. This is a lifeline service to a lot of "bush" Alaskans. Can you really argue that someone's MP3 or divx download should be running at the same priority as a telemedicine video conference where a doctor at a rural hub is trying to talk a PA in a tiny, remote village through stabilizing a patient so the patient will survive long enough to get a medevac flight out to a real hospital? Also, all of the draft net neutrality legislation I have seen looks to me (IANAL) as if it would prohibit any blacklisting based upon source or destination address. At the ISP where I used to work, we maintained static and dynamic RBL's and the like in an attempt to minimize spam sent to our customers' inboxes. Judging by the e-mails our customers sent to our abuse e-mail, by far most of our customers *wanted* this service (actually, many of them griped that we weren't filtering enough). While we also used heuristic filters, the blacklists were our first line of defense against spam.

In the end, I simply don't trust Congress to write a law that adequately balances between legitimate prioritization and blacklisting by an ISP and abusive actions in an attempt to squelch competition (send me an internet through the tubes, if you think Congress is savvy enough to write a good piece of technical legislation...groan, and *he's* from Alaska, too...<shakes head in frustration>) I would rather see market forces determine what an ISP can and cannot do. Perhaps the big boys like AT&T and Sprint are different than the small ISP's where I've worked, but in my experience, most of the network engineers are decent people like most everyone else on /. We want the net to work because we use it, too.

And again!

Every time this comes up, it comes down to this:

Every soundbite explanation I've seen of what "net neutrality" should do has been a disasterously bad idea. Most of them would prohibit me from tar-pitting spammers or just plain dropping their traffic, because I'm not allowed to drop their traffic in preference to someone else's, because that's not "neutral".

In a world of oversold bandwidth, reliability costs extra. Just deal with it already. We have been doing just fine without this legislation for twenty years; we don't need it now.

I wonder...

How much he's getting paid to say that...

Wait a minute!!!!

I thought Al Gore invented the internet!

Technical problem

Net Neutrality is a techincal problem, and the solution will consist of
* Anonymous communication
* Encrypted datara transfers
* Mesh networks

Simply put, just bypass the ISP.

Give it a rest, people

Net Neutrality is a slogan. It means nothing.

Dont you know, anyone running MPLS as their core network is already prioritizing traffic on their backbone?

Big supprise, Internet access has the highest packet loss on the backbone. It is totally 'best effort' service.

All because some droid at ATT got told about the cool things that ARE being done with QoS, CoS, and Tail Drop, you guys have your panties in a wad over something that simply isnt practical.

Then he further displays his ignorance, by claiming they arnt getting paid for other companies use of the network??? We all know that is clearly NOT the case. Everyone pays for access to the network.

Being able to differentiate traffic on the network is a HUGE value add carriers need to be free to offer to customers. Otherwise, the only way they can make themselves more attractive is by spending billions in infrastructure upgrades, while all the while being told thier prices are too high. If they think they can make money selling higher quality bandwidth on their network, why should we be passing laws to stop them?

As long as access to that bandwidth is available to anyone who wants it, there should be no problem.

Will it jepordize some companys? Yes, absolutley. The same way these pump and dump dial up providers did in the mid 90s, offering $9 a month dial up access, if you paid a year up front. Folks that were in the access business for the long term had to quickly change the way they did business to be able to survive in the face of such insane pricing.

There is little revolutionary in this 'problem'.
Its just the network growing up a bit more, and certainly not in an un-anticipated direction. Honestly, why do you think we invented IPV6, QoS markings and queuing systems for IP?

To those who believe this can only lead to a monopolizing of internet voice by the last mile carriers, I ask you, what has changed? Voice, as an application, has long been designed to favor the regional or local carrier. Even the current laws concerning transporting voice 'long distance' acknowledge doing a call over VoiP is still a long distance call, and that fees that apply to a normally trunked call apply to voip trunked calls.

To those who fear content providers will be squeezed out, I say, fear not. The Google's and Yahoo's of the world are premier customers of the network. Not only do they already get better pricing for access than anyone else, they have plenty of documentation showing the value they bring to a carrier's network. Do you really think any carrier in their right mind is going to try and figure out how to double charge these guys, in an effort to do what? Add money to the bottom line? or totally piss them off to the point where they simply stop serving that carriers customers? Whoops! Now your network doesnt talk to yahoo, google and microsoft? Your network now has zero value to me, Buh by!

It works both ways, friends. Never Fear. The Internet routes around these issues all on its own. The only protection it needs from government, is in its physical infrastructures. The rest seems to be sorting itself out quite nicely!

Re:Let's get this out of the way...

KHAAAN! [khaaan.com]

If I were you I wouldn't trust what this guy has to say.

You've got it wrong.

I thought Al was the father of the internet, not this interloper!

No, he invented the internet. He's the father of Global Warming. Sheesh, I thought everyone knew that.

Re:i have to agree

You know, there are times when government stepping in is NOT a bad thing.

Saftey regulations for autos? Certain regulations for electronics equipment (interference, etc.) Regulations for food quality. Healthcare. Drugs.

Government in and of itself is NOT a bad thing. It is the people that run it that make it a bad thing. Remember that.