Ironically, Mr. Cerf claims to be taken out of context while continuing to make his original point. It is clear that he holds the standard Google view, that since there is not enough competition, as Google defines competition — they propose wholesale regulation of the underlying infrastructure — like Google’s Mr Whit proposed in the 700MHz auction as a condition.

The bottom line is Google ignores that US deregulation policies have produced more facilities-based broadband competition than any where in the world — both wireline and wireless.

At core, Mr. Cerf’s desire to “render the Internet more like the public road system” is tantamount to nationalizing a competitive sector of the economy. Adam is dead on, that is how Chavez thinks in Venezuela.

To me, “the public road system” is “owned and controlled by the government,” isn’t it?

You’re trying to defend the indefensible, ole Seth, that’s why you’re feeling frustrated. Cerf is advocating for what Google sees as its interests, nothing more and nothing less.

This is as overheated and absurd as anything on the other side.

“… wishes to repudiate the accurately-reported statement.”

You couldn’t be wrong. The attention-driven ranters and flamers “reporting” what he said are paragons of accuracy, over his own words. Got it.

Why do I bother .

And no, we don’t agree that Cerf said nothing remarkable. While he’s back-pedaled here, that’s not uncommon for someone who’s made an especially naive suggestion. He did in fact make an argument for government control the chief means of government criticism in a public forum meant to advance democracy, and there’s no wheedling out of that short of saying he’s changed his mind and wishes to repudiate the accurately-reported statement.

And finally, I have no more trust for a tenured professor who wishes to be a public figure and is frequently called a “rock star intellectual” than I do for a paid shill. In fact, the paid shill is frequently more honest than the publicity-seeking self-aggrandizer. People are motivated by money until they have enough that it’s not an issue, and after that they stroke their egos. Lessig is stroking his ego, selling books, building a fan base, and damaging our democracy in the process.

1) Lessig advocates A 2) Nobody listened (promoted) Lessig about A until the unrelated B 3) Therefore, A originated B

By the way, do we all agree now that Vint Cerf said something pretty standard and unremarkable, instead of the inflammatory stuff that’s being strawmanned? (if this weren’t Vint Cerf, you just know the Internuts would be filled with HE-DOESN’T-GET-IT frothing, about how that dumb old guy doesn’t have a clue, unlike the hip wired with-it bloggers, natch). Note I didn’t ask if Libertarians agreed it was a good idea – rather, that it wasn’t anything that basically isn’t commonly said in the debate.

Nobody in politics is 100% pure. It’s almost impossible to survive that way. But I’d argue people like Lessig (tenured profs without a lot of financial deals) are pretty much as good as it gets. Anyone who strategizes a Supreme Court case based mainly on thinking he’s come up with a killer principled argument that’ll appeal to conservatives against “all the money in the world”, isn’t operating on the basis of what’s going to enrich himself. And very important, there’s a qualitative difference between them and the kind of political hacks who are just fancy paid liars.

God only knows what that means. All I know is that the Net neutrality movement has their knives drawn and are ready to start hacking!

And yes, Lessig may have sold out cheaply (I can’t find a reference to the $11 Million I remember,) but that doesn’t change what he is.

I don’t know where you get the $11 million figure. Lessig really makes very little money relative to his standing (I’ve checked various filings). Certainly not as much some telecom lobbyists or right-wing hack-tank flacks.

Let me concur with Jim that it’s admirable of Vint to comment on this humble blog. He’s a cultural icon, and we don’t expect icons to come down from their pedestal to mix it up with the rabble, so it’s very cool that he would take the time to comment here. Let’s hope he doesn’t stop until we reach a rough consensus on the right way to run the code.

Now on to Seth: I think your formulation of NN as a battle between two warring camps of capitalistic exploiters is a bit over-simplified. Google finds 350,000+ references to “free speech” plus “net neutrality,” including at least one congressional hearing with that as a title.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22free+speech%22+%22net+neutrality%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Searching His Holiness St. Lessig’s domain, I find such gems as this: “But then let’s hear that debate. Let’s hear people who say competition in applications and content isn’t important. Or that it doesn’t raise issues of free speech. Or whatever other reasons might be advanced to argue that government shouldn’t intervene here. Such arguments would at least be progress in a debate that seems to me so far just stuck in a confusion.”

lessig.org/blog/2006/05/fair_use_and_network_neutralit.html

…and 31 other references. Granted, Lessig has taken $11M from Google, but he’s not supposed to be corruptible, is he?

I agree that at its core, this is a commercial debate, but as a creature of politics it is typically dressed-up in free speech garments.

Can we really trust any government to protect free speech?

Now on to Seth: I think your formulation of NN as a battle between two warring camps of capitalistic exploiters is a bit over-simplified. Google finds 350,000+ references to “free speech” plus “net neutrality,” including at least one congressional hearing with that as a title.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22free+speech%22+%22net+neutrality%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Searching His Holiness St. Lessig’s domain, I find such gems as this: “But then let’s hear that debate. Let’s hear people who say competition in applications and content isn’t important. Or that it doesn’t raise issues of free speech. Or whatever other reasons might be advanced to argue that government shouldn’t intervene here. Such arguments would at least be progress in a debate that seems to me so far just stuck in a confusion.”

http://lessig.org/blog/2006/05/fair_use_and_network_neutralit.html

…and 31 other references. Granted, Lessig has taken $11M from Google, but he’s not supposed to be corruptible, is he?

I agree that at its core, this is a commercial debate, but as a creature of politics it is typically dressed-up in free speech garments.

Can we really trust any government to protect free speech?

I read Vint Cerf as merely re-iterating the position of one side of that dispute – that network upgrades should be funded as government-built infrastructure, and hence any given tier of access should be available on a no-buyer-discrimination basis (that is, Brand X was wrongly decided and should be undone). This is neither a difficult nor an irrational position. But it has the word “government” in it – that causes certain knee-jerk ideological reactions, of which the post here is a fine example.

The Internet can’t help you if you need sub-25ms response time, for example, or if you need to move massive amounts of data very quickly, or if you need location independence. So it forecloses whole classes of virtual reality/holographic and mobile applications that are going to be important some day.

The highway system has three classes of service: expedited flow in the HOV lane, normal flow, and slow flow in the truck lanes. The Internet isn’t capable of uniformly managing this sort of service diversity, but if it were, it might be credible to call it “general purpose.”

It’s also worth noting that the network that Vint and Bob Kahn designed in the 1970s isn’t much like the Internet that we use today. They older network was actually quite neutral with respect to location, but it didn’t handle congestion correctly, so it was essentially replaced the Van Jacobson network where service quality depends on temporal distance. Something similar happened with Ethernet, where an early system that relied on distributed intelligence and only supplied one service class was replaced by a system with centralized intelligence (in the switches) and multiple service classes (in the VLANs.) But we still call these networks by the names of their ancestors out of respect for the inventors.

Google has built their infrastructure around the exploitation of the Jacobson network’s location bias: Googleplexes all over the globe that force themselves into the fast lane created by small Round-Trip Times and crowd out other traffic. TCP flow rates, you see, are the inverse of RTTs. That wasn’t the case in Vint’s Internet, but it is today, so we have to be suspicious of any plan that seeks to reify the Internet of today by foreclosing experimentation in core services.

It’s interesting to note that the government does not own the Internet infrastructure in any of the nations cited as Utopias by the NN advocates: they’re all recently-privatized companies, and they didn’t lay down fiber while owned by their governments.

We know what a government-owned network infrastructure looks like: China. I would submit that we don’t want the US heading down that path.