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."

Comments

Neutrality

[Cryolithic]

"What makes a good network go neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a switch full of neutrality?"

Re:Neutrality

[hamburger lady]

All I know is my gut says "maybe".

Re:Neutrality

[tylernt]

You forgot the "obFuturamaQuote" disclaimer.

Wait a second...

[r00t]

He's given a Presidential Medal of Freedom to keep him from testifying before Congress?

It'd obviously be denied, but you have to wonder.

Central Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Central control is happening, and will happen .. like it or not. Simply because people want government to control who uses the internet. For example people branding themselves "social conservatives" don't want porn on the internet. The police want to be able to catch "cyber criminals". As the story on slashdot this morning, the french don't like people blogging certain views on the riots. Chinese want to arrest anyone who says democracy is a good thing. RIAA doesn't want piracy. I don't want spam.

They want to centralize so they can control. Without centralization it is expensive to control. Nobody cares that centralization causes problems for legitimate users. They want to enforce their control, so you can present convincing argument after convincing argument that decentralization is best .. but they will all fail unless you demonstrate how control can be enforced.

OFFTOPIC RANT:
So yeah .. people are advocating centralization so they can solve their little issues. But I say this .. the internet is simply a communications mechanism. Controlling a communications mechanism is only going to cause problems for legitimate users. Everyone should use encryption to communicate. Encryption should be encourage. Hell I'd even support legislation to force everyone to encrypt their communication. I believe it's that important to the survival of liberty.

Even anonymity is being shunned on the net. For example, even the leftist hypocritical website moveon.org takes comments but they dont want you to be anonymous or use a pseudonym. How many letters did Ben Franklin write with the pseudonym "Silence Dogood" claiming to be an old widow? Anonymity and pseudonimity are essential. If an anonymous source spouts out info, you can simply disregard it because they are not staking their reputation. But sometimes they may need the anonymity to avoid persecution, especially when they say something that can stand alone on its own merit.

Re:Central Control

[l2718]

I think there's a difference between regulating people's behaviour and regulating the infrastructure. If it's illegal to sell porn in the street, why shouldn't it be illegal to see on the internet? Conversely, since it's legal to publish anonymous pamphlets on the street (important founding-era right implicit in the First Amendment), it should be legal to publish anonymous websites. It's for this reason that people who own printing presses ("infrastructure") cannot be forced to keep a copy of everything they print, or to provide a sample page to the government for future comparison (this was the case in the USSR -- even for typewriters!).

Indeed the government has always wanted to control the infrastrcture, but it won't necessarily happen. What they mostly want is to ban things that are already illegal -- and we should give them that to keep the infrastructure safe. We can late ask why consensual porn is illegal at all -- but not with the republicrats in power.

Text of the letter

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Chairman Barton and Ranking Member Dingell,

I appreciate the inquiries by your staff about my availability to appear before the Committee and to share Google's views about draft telecommunications legislation and the issues related to "network neutrality." These are matters of great importance to the Internet and Google welcomes the Committee's hard work and attention. The hearing unfortunately conflicts with another obligation, and I am sorry I will not be able to attend. (Along with my colleague Robert Kahn, I am honored to be receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wednesday at the White House for our work in creating the Internet protocol TCP/IP.)

Despite my inability to participate in the planned hearing in person, I hope that you will accept some brief observations about this legislation.

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.

My fear is that, as written, this bill would do great damage to the Internet as we know it. Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity. Allowing broadband providers to segment their IP offerings and reserve huge amounts of bandwidth for their own services will not give consumers the broadband Internet our country and economy need. Many people will have little or no choice among broadband operators for the foreseeable future, implying that such operators will have the power to exercise a great deal of control over any applications placed on the network.

As we move to a broadband environment and eliminate century-old non-discrimination requirements, a lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive. Telephone companies cannot tell consumers who they can call; network operators should not dictate what people can do online.

I am confident that we can build a broadband system that allows users to decide what websites they want to see and what applications they want to use - and that also guarantees high quality service and network security. That network model has and can continue to provide economic benefits to innovators and consumers--and to the broadband operators who will reap the rewards for providing access to such a valued network.

We appreciate the efforts in your current draft to create at least a starting point for net neutrality principles. Google looks forward to working with you and your staff to draft a bill that will maintain the revolutionary potential of the broadband Internet.

Thank you for your attention and for your efforts on these important issues.

Sincerely,

Vinton Cerf
Chief Internet Evangelist
Google Inc.

Be sure to read the paragraph concerning the bill.

Re:What's a Vint Cerf?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

> What's a Vint Cerf?

Along with being one of the patron saints of the Internet, he's the current chairman of ICANN.

Control RFC

[nurb432]

Just give me control. No one else is worthy.

He should have turned down the medal.

[CyricZ]

He should have turned down that medal so he could have consulted with Congress in person. That would have been a true defense of freedom.

Congress should NOT regulate the Internet

[eyebits]

Does it strike anyone else odd that a group of people who, in general, know nothing about technology are trying to regulate/create laws regarding the Internet? I can't imagine that any discussion held by these leaders would have any merit. In fact, if anyone with a technology background were to listen in it would be like listening to a bunch of grade school children trying to have an informative discussion about Quantum Physics.

Important correction

[A beautiful mind]

"This bill could fundamentally alter the fabulously successful end-to-end Internet"

It should read as:

"This bill could fundamentally alter the USA's section of the fabulously successful end-to-end Internet"

Unless of course you want to give yet another reason for why the USA should relinquish control over root dns to some truly international entity.

Re:Important correction

[RexRhino]

The trouble is that the international entity that people want to turn over control to is even more rabidly totalitarian than the United States.

I mean look at the critism that most Europeans have over the U.S. ... it is too easy to get guns, there aren't enough laws to restrict buisnesses, taxes are too low, "hate speech" is not punished, health care should be nationalized and controlled by a central authority, etc., etc. They are not complaining for the most part that the U.S. restricts freedoms, they are complaining that the U.S. is too free and a "cowboy culture" (actually, there are many European countries that are more free-market and laize faire than the U.S., like Switzerland... but that is not the stereotype that Europeans generally have about themselves and the United States... many Europeans consider being free-market liberals a bad thing, and so would take it an insult instead of a compliment when I call Switzerland free market).

The trouble is, as bad as U.S. starting to regulate the Internet would be, the people who want U.N. control want it because they feel the U.S. has been neglecting the Internet. It is not that they don't like U.S. regulations, it is that they don't feel the U.S. has been doing enough to regulate. In fact many think this drive by the U.S. government to regulate the Internet more is being done as a concession to ease the fears of the people who want the U.N. in control of the Internet... that this is a plan to make big reforms to highly control the internet, allowing cencorship, eliminating anonymity, and showing the world community that the U.S. government agrees with their plans to censor, centralize, and control. It is a sort of peace offering if you will.

Show us the truly international entity that have a deep and abiding love for Anarchy and freedom, and those of us against U.N. control would likely fully support an international system (or, more likely, a truly decentralized system where no-one is in control). But the U.N. is not promising to keep the Internet free, the U.N. is promising the strict controls they feel that the U.S. is negligent in providing.

So while we will work to stop the U.S. government from controlling the Internet, we have no illusions that the U.N. is going to be any better.

He's Against It

[blamanj]

The writeup does a lousy job of telling us what the bill is about. It is apparently legislation to create a statutory framework for Internet Protocol and Broadband Services.

Here's what Cerf says: My fear is that, as written, this bill would do great damage to the Internet as we know it.

Deaf ears...

[grasshoppa]

This guy is wasting his breath. The people making the decisions now are motivated by greed.

"A little control won't hurt anybody, and it will line my pockets a bit." That's the mentality we're faced with, only multiplied by a couple 100's of thousand of greedy PHBs.

The only real way to fight that, that I've come up with at least, is spaid or neutering your local politician. Then electronically tag them.

Please, think of the children.

How things have changed

[msbsod]

"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.

My inet provider ...

[Empty Yo]

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.

Dear Gods....

[barefootgenius]

Give the internet to the universities, at least that way the thing will work, the universities can make money, nerds will be happy, and it might still be able to be saved from business focused ideals.

And I don't mean just the universities in the west, all of them from Iran to Iran (sorry, but it is a sphere). Let them sort it out because if we leave it to any government, its a lost battle.

Don't get me wrong, the U.S.A. has done a fine job of inventing and managing the system so far, but unfortunately now they appear to have turned into a pack of paranoid, power grabbing, business controlled, idiots.

Its turning from, "Government for the people, by the people, and of the people" to, "Government of the people, by the corporate, behind the lobby group".