Leviathan Spam
Send the bits with lasers and chips See the bytes with LED lights
Wireless, optical, bandwidth boom A flood of info, a global zoom
Now comes Lessig Now comes Wu To tell us what we cannot do
The Net, they say, Is under attack Stop! Before we can’t turn back
They know best These coder kings So they prohibit a billion things
What is on their list of don’ts? Most everything we need the most
To make the Web work We parse and label We tag the bits to keep the Net stable
The cloud is not magic It’s routers and switches It takes a machine to move exadigits
Now Lessig tells us to route is illegal
To manage Net traffic, Wu’s ultimate evil
The FCC in Oh Eight bought into the theory And Comcast, the Chairman determined to bury
Then on Nine Twenty One Genachowski declareth Thou shalt not give primacy Networks, you must shareth
The Net’s great virtue was decentralization But Julius from on high decreed concentration of power and decisions over all peers Substitute bureaucrats for Net engineers
You may not Shall not Cannot cap It’s discrimination! Don’t you know that?
You may not give the bits a weighting No matter importance, voice or data
You may not Shall not Cannot charge Even though the bytes are large
In what other sector is pricing illegal? All for nothing as business model is laughably feeble
Silicon, wires, software glue It takes tens of billions to make bits move
You cannot charge You cannot price You cannot cap It won’t suffice
No, no, they say, to bit analysis Though it may lead to Net paralysis
We will not tolerate Q. O. S. Not Weighted Round Robin Nor flow-based service
Not Q-in-Q Not PBT Nor SLAs at Layer Three
Storewidth and caching to speed the bits through Akamai, Limelight cut latency to you Though the result is customer speed Don’t you get it? You may not give priority
Content, conduit, Googleplex This neutrality thing may lead to bit wrecks
We thought all was well 3G, 4G, then WiMax! But the once free Net suffered bureaucratic attacks
When zetta visual bits and mobile nets collide Will the Chairman answer his phone? . . . Or run and hide?
Out: speed, gadgets, quantum innovation In: lobbyists, lawyers, mass litigation
Come to Washington Ask us permission Don’t they know it’s abundance they’re missin’?
But abundance is over Scarcity is cool We thought the Web was different Now who’s the fool?
Moore’s law transcends the cramped, dire fears of misnamed Free Press They’re no high tech seers
Mr. Chairman, please might you cut us a break? Should D.C. micromanage the guts of cyberspace?
If you ban the codes that make the Net work DiffServ, IPsec, and Dual Leaky Bucket Net investors may revolt and with fury say ————!
Who knows what the Web will bring Which business models or networks will reign With Net traffic growing at 60 percent Shouldn’t techies experiment?
With fiber and cable to bandwidth enable Googleplex servers a giant content stable
We do useful things like BRED and Draft Martini But once Neutrality is loosed, might we never bottle this genie?
What about MPLS and Inter Frame Gap? Utopians now rule Get used to that fact
Traffic, apps, digital value exploding So tell me, FCC What the heck is the problem?
The Net keeps on giving Like water to wine No artificial limits Abundance sublime
But D.C. takes this great bounty for granted Reap others’ rewards, assume innovation planted
Tera, peta, exa, zetta So long free Net, see ya later
Miracle though the Net may be The global telecosm is not free
— Bret Swanson
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.