Creating the New Public Network

Codeine writes: "Tom Lyons argues persuasively that the incumbent competitors might be incapable of delivering an utility IP network. Competition in such commodity markets encourages the breaking of connectivity, ``Connectivity is the fundamental service of the Internet, yet it is connectivity that suffers first when network providers compete for users and services.'' Thus he proposes the Institute for the Promotion of the Internet Protocol Utility."

Comments

The way the world works

[Anonymous Coward]

Competition is a bad motivation. Don't get me wrong, it is a powerful motivator, but a bad one. What is competition? A form of fighting. Fighting is about winning. It is not about doing what is right, what is for the best, nor even what is logical. It is about destroying those who threaten your personal or collective power and ambitions.
I think it is telling that so few today believe anything other than greed and threats to personal power and prestiege can be motivators.

Where has he been?

[b.foster]

Connectivity on the modern internet has been broken for many years, and will continue to stay that way as long as it is in providers' best interest to do so. Let's take a look at some examples to see why the problem is intractable:

• The internet is global. Although America has a bit of a stranglehold on most of the network, large portions of the internet are controlled by different governments, many of whom do not cooperate with the others. Saudi Arabia, China, and Iraq all firewall off most of the American internet hosts to suppress democracy. What makes My. Lyons think that these nations would be open to creating a "new public network" that allows free and open access?
• Blackhole lists are the rule, not the exception. Remember MAPS and ORBS, who asked participants to load ACLs onto their routers that killed off the class Cs and class Bs of suspected spammers? Well, these almost always resulted in collateral damage to unsuspecting customers of spammer-friendly ISPs. This created a dark underbelly of the internet: redlined addresses that were like the bastard half-brothers of the other hosts on the network, unable to access many important sites.
• Rogue nations need to be dealt with. Some nations, such as Korea and Russia, are widely acknowledged to have a preposterously bad record in dealing with security issues. Part of the problem is that their WHOIS system is unfriendly to English speakers; part of the problem is that their system administrators are severely overburdened and do not have time to fix r00ted systems. The problem arises in that it makes sense for Western hosts and ISPs to block traffic to and from these nations, in order to protect their own interests.

Re:it's the age old question

[Enigma23]

"Public involvement for the public good" can and does work, as was proven by John Nash's work on Game Theory that earned him a Nobel Prize for his paper on, if I recall corrctly, co-operative endeavour in game thoery.

IANA Mathematician, however..

Re:it's the age old question

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

IAA Mathematician...

John Nash's work on Game Theory did not, IMO, have much to do with "public involvement for the public good". It basically attacked John Smith's notion that in general, the best outcome is achieved when all participants do what is in their best interest. Nash basically demonstrated that the best outcome actually MAY occur when all participants work together. This is hardly, I think, blanket support for "public involvement", rather, it supports the notion that if all the Tier-1 ISP's worked together instead of bloodthirstily competing with each other, the best outcome could result.

However, as most Tier-1 ISP's are publicly held, the shareholders do not really care about "the best outcome" for all involved, they want THEIR Tier-1 ISP to WIN COMPLETELY, and, obviously, have not read any of Nash's theories :)

Balancing rights

[nuggz]

As a private company with a contract with individuals they can allow and prohibit anything they want.

It seems that the key arguement towards making internet access a utility is to remove onerous clauses from the contract, similar to consumer protection laws, existing utility legislation, and tenant rights laws.

I think this is good, charge for speed or data transfer.
But what about spammers flooding and other hostile attacks?
Removing the ability for the corporation to limit user behaviour would requite the government to limit user behaviour, with the current situation (MPAA, RIAA, DMCA, and others issues of course) we may want to be careful what we wish for.

Need IPv6 anyway...

[Thinkit2]

This will have to get sorted out before we do increased addresses in IPv6.

One word

[Rupert]

Latency.

You don't notice it on your XM radio, because it's all one way. The various satellite IP systems I've seen have played rather scary games with the network stack in order to get some semblance of performance (and even then, not nearly as good as cable or DSL).