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Vint Cerf Speaking Out on Internet Neutrality
penciling_in writes "CircleID has reported on a U.S. congress hearing held on November 9th, where "significant focus was projected on 'network neutrality' and a new telecommunications bill affecting the Internet. 'This bill could fundamentally alter the fabulously successful end-to-end Internet,' says Alan Davidson in a related post on Google blog." Vint Cerf was not able to testify because of the Presidential Medal of Freedom award ceremony at the White House, but submitted a letter: "The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has led to an explosion of offerings - from VOIP to 802.11x wi-fi to blogging - that might never have evolved had central control of the network been required by design." CircleID post includes full text of the letter."
They can have the internet when they pry it from our cold dead fingers!
Seriously though with out regulation how can we get rid of all the spyware/adware out there??
Shut off the internet access of morons who get pwned, and charge them a slightly steep reconnection fee once they get their computer un-fucked. That's how the electric and gas companies where I live deal with deadbeats.
You'll probably say that people will just find themselves a new ISP, but first off, switching ISPs is a pain. Second, you can only do it so many times before you run out of new ISPs to use. I highly doubt frequently-pwned idiots will acutally move to a new domicile to restore their internet access.
"No gatekeepers", no "control in the middle of the network"? Unfortunately this is no longer true. Remember why the World Wide Web was developed at CERN (Europe)? Because physicists wanted to exchange documents in a network of computers, their computers. By now the networks of most research labs and universities have been taken over my inept administrators who call themself network managers. Researchers can no longer use their computers as web servers. Now all has to go through controlled centralized machines, run the administrators. Even simple e-mail exchange from computer to computer no longer work. Now we need mail exchangers, which again are centralized controlled systems. Of course the administrators love to point out that this is all a matter of policies and security. Policies made by the administrators and security problems cause by the administors' insecure Microsoft Windows systems. It gets worse. Not only do such centralized gatekeepers limit our freedom as researchers, they also cost money. A lot of money, which is deducted from the research budgets. The Internet is changing, no doubt. It is happening in Europe, the US, Asia, all over the world.
Just announced in their annual industry meeting that they are considering QoS penalties on IP services that compete with their own offerings (phone, inet, tv), so I'm seeing this evolve in Canada first hand. The speaker used the highway metaphor, saying that the company was tired of providing the highway at their cost while others rode on it for free. I spoke to him afterwards and reminded him that my inet packets spend over 99% of their time on the Internet and only a small percentage of time on his company's network, making the more apt metaphor a door instead of a highway. I then asked him whether he considered it fair for the person holding the door to dictate where I went and what I did once I walked through, especially since I had already paid the doorman to walk through in the first place. It turned into quite a lively debate.
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
Yes it does. If the government makes something like blogging in favor of a candidate 30 days before an election illegal (which argueably it is illegal), and the politicians don't understand that one can blog anonymously from the server located outside the U.S., then they are not going to know that their law has no effect. If the government requires that all connections between machines be logged (like all telephone calls are required to be logged), and they don't understand that IPs can be spoofed, and that packets cannot be tracked accuratly, they won't know that their law will be ineffective. If the government bans all peer to peer file sharing in order to fight piracy, and they don't know that p2p file sharing is used for completly legit reasons, then they could end up implementing policy that could be disasterous.
There is all sorts of disasterous legislation that the government can come up with if it doesn't properly understand the technology.