Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
In the latest issue of TechKnowledge, I explain why free software should give libertarians a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
And over at Ars, I analyze Google’s network neutrality position and argue that Congress should take a wait-and-see posture on the issue.
I was afraid the latter column would get a hostile reaction from the Ars readership, but the response at the Ars forums has been fairly positive.
Google makes some excellent points in the comments it filed with the Federal Communications Commission in a proceeding examining proposals for network neutrality regulation.
First, Google argues that packet prioritization ( i.e., Quality of Service) is a “poor proxy for additional bandwidth.”
[T]he engineers at Internet2 conducted a detailed technical analysis of QoS in broadband networks. Their conclusion is that QoS is a relatively poor proxy for additional bandwidth: In most bandwidth markets important to network-based research, it is cheaper to buy more capacity and to provide everybody with excellent service than it is to mess with QoS. In those few places where network upgrades are not practical, QoS deployment is usually even harder (due to the high cost of QoS-capable routers and clueful network engineers).
The FCC’s call for comments on net neutrality ended on Friday and, as Wired News reports, over 11,000 individuals had something to say on the issue. As much as I like the idea of people getting involved in politics, the NN issue has brought out the sad, herd-like, mentality of a lot of people who simply want to vent against what they see as “the fabulously wealthy and the corporate world” (see Wired piece).
Net neutrality is a non-issue that became a big issue BECAUSE some fabulously wealthy corporations (think Google and Ebay here) wanted everyone to get into a tizzy so they had better bargaining chips for broadband prices for themselves. Indeed, the nature of the net neutrality debate was recently revealed when a bill to establish net neutrality principles was defeated in Maine. After the defeat, supporters of net neutrality claimed a victory simply because the legislature agreed to a non-binding resolution to study the issue. Claiming success when the reality is actually defeat smacks of the kind of tactics corrupt dictatorships resort to in their last days. Perhaps this is a sign that the net neutrality militia is about to go belly-up.
Ars reports that Illinois is the latest state to jump on the franchise reform bandwagon. I haven’t looked at the specific bill, but if it’s anything like Missouri’s legislation I think it’ll be good for consumers.
Perhaps the best thing about it is that each new telecom bill that passes reduces the risk of new telecom legislation at the federal level. Franchise reform was near the top of the telcos’ wish list in the last Congress, and without that spur, they’re likely to lobby against any changes in telecom rules. Eighteen months ago I argued that we should all be rooting for the telecom bill to go down in flames, and I got my wish in the last session. I’m rooting for the same outcome this session.
Google’s new blog has a post laying out their position on network neutrality. I’m probably missing something, but it strikes me as rather incoherent:
What kind of behavior is okay?Prioritizing all applications of a certain general type, such as streaming video; Managing their networks to, for example, block certain traffic based on IP address in order to prevent harmful denial of service (DOS) attacks, viruses or worms; Employing certain upgrades, such as the use of local caching or private network backbone links; Providing managed IP services and proprietary content (like IPTV); and Charging consumers extra to receive higher speed or performance capacity broadband service.
On the other hand:
What isn’t okay?Levying surcharges on content providers that are not their retail customers; Prioritizing data packet delivery based on the ownership or affiliation (the who) of the content, or the source or destination (the what) of the content; or Building a new “fast lane” online that consigns Internet content and applications to a relatively slow, bandwidth-starved portion of the broadband connection.
So if Verizon builds a 30 Mbps pipe to consumers’ homes, and allocates 25 Mbps to a proprietary IPTV service (“Providing managed IP services and proprietary content”) and 5 Mbps to public Internet traffic, is that OK? What if they then consign all video traffic (“all applications of a certain general type”) in the public Internet to the lowest priority, rendering it effectively unusable? And can they then syndicate content from third parties through their IPTV service?
If so, I don’t understand what network neutrality is supposed to accomplish. If not, how am I mis-reading Google’s proposal?
Google’s public policy shop today officially joined the blogosphere, joining Cisco (February 4, 2005), Global Crossing (November 7, 2005), and Verizon Communications (October 2, 2006), each of which already have corporate policy blogs. The maiden post, by Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs, promises “public policy advocacy in a Googley way.” It’s one in which users will “be part of the effort” to help “refine and improve” the company’s policy positions. The blog already has 12 posts, done during the company’s internal test. The most recent – which I suspect provided the occasion to officially launch the blog – is a short summary of the official Google position on network neutrality.
A reader sent me a link to the controversy last week over the blocking of Listpic by Craig’s List. Listpic was a service that allowed users to view Craig’s List ads as image thumbnails rather than as text ads:
In an e-mail to Wired News, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster explains the company’s position: “The 0.1% of our users who were accessing Craigslist images via Listpic were creating a grossly disproportionate drain on our server resources, degrading performance significantly for the 99.9% of our users accessing Craigslist in the normal fashion. Besides frequently hitting our site to harvest Craigslist user content for re-display on their site, each Listpic page load was causing our systems to serve up approx 100 full size images.” In a forum post on Craigslist, company founder Craig Newmark (look for his yellow name tag) echoed Buckmaster’s comments. And of course there’s the inconvenient little fact that ListPic was serving Craigslist data on an external website while selling advertising — a big no-no.
The reader who emailed it to me suggested that this was an illustration of Craig Newmark’s hypocrisy for advocating network neutrality for telcos while discriminating against websites using Craig’s List content in ways they don’t approve of. I don’t think that’s quite right. I certainly think Craig’s support of Internet regulations is misguided, but I don’t think this really illustrates it. In the first place, network neutrality is a principle for ISPs to follow. No one has ever seriously suggested that it be applied to websites, and indeed, it’s not even clear what a neutrality policy for websites would even mean. Second, Listpic was not a Craig’s List customer, and so there’s no reason Craig’s List has any obligations at all to Listpic. Third, Craig appears to be claiming that Listpic wasn’t even serving up the images itself, but was hot-linking the images from Craig’s List’s servers—hot linking on such a large scale is universally regarded as a no-no.
There are good arguments against government regulation of the Internet, but spurious accusations of hypocrisy against Craig’s List, Google, or anybody else is not among them.
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell marked his one-year anniversary at the commission last week. More than a symbolic milestone, the anniversary means the end of most of the conflict-of-interest restraints that — due to his prior tenure as a lobbyist — has kept him from voting on some key issues. Now that he’s freed, the commission will truly have, for the first time since Chester Arthur was president I believe, a full contingent of voting members.
McDowell marked the occasion by, appropriately enough, speaking his mind. He gave a barnstorm of a speech at the Broadband Policy Summit, taking a hefty swipe at the OECD and its recently-released stats on broadband. The OECD showed the U.S. lagging at 15th place interenationally in broadband penetration, leading to massive hangwringing from the media and from most policymakers. But McDowell, playing gloombuster, took issue with the OECD’s numbers in detail, pointing out its “fundamental flaws.” Among his criticisms:
Huh. Someone at the hyperbolically-named “Save the Internet” Coalition screwed up. In celebration of Ed Whitacre’s retirement, they made a satirical cartoon purporting to be his final speech to his management team.
They then linked to this video in a blog post with some of the “quotes” in the video. The only problem is that they didn’t do a very good job of marking it as satire. In fact, they wrote what appears to be a point-by-point rebuttal of Whitacre’s “speech.”
It got picked up by Slashdot this morning, and the comments there demonstrate that hardly any of Slashdot’s readers got the joke.
I’m sure this was an honest mistake on Save the Internet’s part. But so far, there’s no sign of an update more clearly labeling it as a parody. Yes, it’s obvious if you watch the video that it’s a parody, but there’s hardly any hint it’s a parody in the text of the post, and it shouldn’t have been that hard to predict that a lot of people would just read the text and not watch the video.
I’m reading Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet, an excellent history of the Internet starting with its origins as the ARPANET in the 1960s. The most interesting things I’ve learned about so far is the heated battled between the TCP/IP protocol, which was favored primarily by the computer science research community, and the competing X.25 protocol, which was favored by the telecom industry. Embarrassingly, I didn’t know anything about this argument before I picked up Abbate’s book. What’s striking about it is how similar it sounds to arguments today. From page 161:
The operators of public data networks argued that ARPA’s TCP/IP failed to provide adequate control over network operations. For instance, a Telenet spokesman noted that, whereas X.25 was capable of controlling the flow of packets from each individual connection, TCP could only act on an entire host’s output at once. If one of the network connections from a host malfunctioned and flooded a TCP/IP network with packets, the network’s only defense would be to cut off the entire host, thus unfairly penalizing the others users on that host. Users of the research network might accept the inconvenience with resignation, but paying customers of a public data network would certainly protest. With regard to the business of running a network, the [Post, Telephone, and Telegraph Authorities] pointed out that IP had not been designed to allow networks to exchange the type of information that would be required for access control or cost accounting… TCP/IP had not been designed for a network serving as a public utility, with service guarantees and access charges. X.25 had been.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
