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?"

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.