I corrected my post on CircleID after learning that the false impression that the FCC was going to fine Comcast was snuck in by a headline writer at the New York Times and not by the AP reporter who covers the FCC beat. Martin was actually rather coy about his specific plan when he leaked the story, and the reporter was actually played a bit. It would be nice if you could update the quote from my CircleID post. Any or all of the first three paragraphs should do:
Note: this is an update on my earlier story, which incorrectly said that the AP reported that Chairman Martin was seeking to impose "fines" on Comcast. In fact, the story used the word "punish" rather than "fine," and a headline writer at the New York Times added "penalty" to it: "F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on Comcast" (I won't quote the story because I'm a blogger and the AP is the AP, so click through.) Much of the initial reaction to the story was obviously colored by the headline.
Martin's concept of punishment is to order the company to do what it had already told the public it was doing, phasing out one system of traffic management in favor of another one. It's a non-penalty punishment, akin to forcing a misbehaving child to eat the candies she's already enjoying. Now back to our story.
At a press conference today, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he's not seeking to fine Comcast. Rather, he will simply impose some reporting requirements on them and order them to do what they've already started to do, phase out the current traffic management system in favor of an application-agnostic one.
It's good to see so many of the readers getting my analysis of the technical issues affected by the current controversy.
All I'm really trying to say is that we're not done with the technical design of the Internet yet, but if some of these NN laws pass, we damn sure will be.
You can't address every issue in five minutes of introductory remarks, unfortunately, but next time I'll try and do better. I appreciate that the grass-roots support for NN comes from people who are mainly worried about free speech, and I have addressed that in the past. I suggest that the bills and regulations should address free speech directly, and not issues of network engineering. That should make everybody happy. I setup an activist web site in 1996, and the last thing I want is for anybody to censor it, and that includes the government, the ISPs, and the Search Monopoly.
We can protect free speech without banning advances in network architecture.
Unfortunately, Lessig was wrong, and Japan has proved it. He was a lot less brash with this prediction at the recent FCC hearing on the Stanford campus, essentially retracting it. It turns out that adding bandwidth in the first mile contributes equally to adding and subtracting congestion.
The experience of Japan and Korea is that simply adding bandwidth, especially symmetrical bandwidth, to first-mile networks doesn't make the congestion problem go away; they're got 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s links, and still have to ration P2P bandwidth to prevent 5% of the users from hogging 75% of network capacity. The problem is that additional bandwidth is instantly consumed by queued-up P2P file transfers. They complete quicker, and the P2P users respond to that by doing even more P2P transfers. So bandwidth, in real networks, is like memory in computers: applications expand to consume it all. That's what they're supposed to do, after all.
The net neutrality fight as a political and economic matter is largely a fight between Big Content (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et. al.) and the Telcos for who controls the Telco networks. My article doesn't address that, because my main concern is that regardless of who wins in Washington, the challenges of network engineering will continue, and I'd hate to see engineers have their hands tied by well-meaning but misguided prescriptions.
Kudos to Tacos for this miserable wastage of electrons. The article goes on forever, contains little but fantasies and conspiracy theories, and ultimately has nothing at all to do with the subject matter.
It does illustrate one of the Great Dangers of Net Neutrality, however: if the law mandates specific network behavior, every router misconfiguration is a criminal offense, whether it's intentional or not, and whether it's done for a revenue-enhancing purpose or not. The neutrinos were all screaming a few months ago about Cox Cable allegedly blocking Craig's List and it turned out the cause of the problem was the window size advertised by Craig's List and a spam filter, nothing to do with net neutrality.
Is a little consideration for the reader too much to ask?
Google doesn't want the consumer to have the same choice of service plans they do. The bill they're sponsoring requires ISPs to offer no more than one QoS level to the ordinary buying public. And then they complain about a "two-tier Internet".
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Thanks.
It's good to see so many of the readers getting my analysis of the technical issues affected by the current controversy.
All I'm really trying to say is that we're not done with the technical design of the Internet yet, but if some of these NN laws pass, we damn sure will be.
You can't address every issue in five minutes of introductory remarks, unfortunately, but next time I'll try and do better. I appreciate that the grass-roots support for NN comes from people who are mainly worried about free speech, and I have addressed that in the past. I suggest that the bills and regulations should address free speech directly, and not issues of network engineering. That should make everybody happy. I setup an activist web site in 1996, and the last thing I want is for anybody to censor it, and that includes the government, the ISPs, and the Search Monopoly.
We can protect free speech without banning advances in network architecture.
Unfortunately, Lessig was wrong, and Japan has proved it. He was a lot less brash with this prediction at the recent FCC hearing on the Stanford campus, essentially retracting it. It turns out that adding bandwidth in the first mile contributes equally to adding and subtracting congestion.
Oops.
The experience of Japan and Korea is that simply adding bandwidth, especially symmetrical bandwidth, to first-mile networks doesn't make the congestion problem go away; they're got 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s links, and still have to ration P2P bandwidth to prevent 5% of the users from hogging 75% of network capacity. The problem is that additional bandwidth is instantly consumed by queued-up P2P file transfers. They complete quicker, and the P2P users respond to that by doing even more P2P transfers. So bandwidth, in real networks, is like memory in computers: applications expand to consume it all. That's what they're supposed to do, after all.
The net neutrality fight as a political and economic matter is largely a fight between Big Content (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et. al.) and the Telcos for who controls the Telco networks. My article doesn't address that, because my main concern is that regardless of who wins in Washington, the challenges of network engineering will continue, and I'd hate to see engineers have their hands tied by well-meaning but misguided prescriptions.
Kudos to Tacos for this miserable wastage of electrons. The article goes on forever, contains little but fantasies and conspiracy theories, and ultimately has nothing at all to do with the subject matter.
It does illustrate one of the Great Dangers of Net Neutrality, however: if the law mandates specific network behavior, every router misconfiguration is a criminal offense, whether it's intentional or not, and whether it's done for a revenue-enhancing purpose or not. The neutrinos were all screaming a few months ago about Cox Cable allegedly blocking Craig's List and it turned out the cause of the problem was the window size advertised by Craig's List and a spam filter, nothing to do with net neutrality.
Is a little consideration for the reader too much to ask?
Google doesn't want the consumer to have the same choice of service plans they do. The bill they're sponsoring requires ISPs to offer no more than one QoS level to the ordinary buying public. And then they complain about a "two-tier Internet".
Google is the Antichrist.