|
Friday, June 9, 2006
Previous topic
|
Next topic
|
|
 Friday, June 9, 2006
started 6/9/2006; 5:25:12 PM - last post 6/10/2006; 5:49:55 PM
|
|
Doc Searls - Friday, June 9, 2006 
6/9/2006; 9:25:12 PM (reads: 4683, responses: 2)
|
|
Down but not out 
| | IP Democracy runs a bunch of quotes from various partisans on the matter of Net Neutrality, after the pro-Neutrality Markey Amendment was shot down on mostly partisan (Democrats for, Republicans against) lines, while the bill it failed to amend passed by better than a 3-to-1 margin. The bill, says the New York Times, followed "the policy agenda of the nation's largest telephone companies.". |
| | The bill (H.R.5252, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006, or COPE) contains net neutrality measures that some call "watered down". |
| | Whatever. The bill was never about Net Neutrality. It was mostly about allowing phone companies to horn in on Cable's television business. Remember television? For that matter, remember the telephone? My point exactly. |
| | On the plus side, Net Neutrality got geeks interested in politics. Also, Congress bucked the citizens on this one. Citizens have hated the phone companies for the duration, and cable companies for nearly as long. Net Neutrality may have been poorly defined, but citizens taking an interest in both the Net and politics can easily see the carriers' "pro-business" anti-Neutrality rhetoric for the bullshit it is. Yes, we need the government to stay out of the free marketplace, and to let the market sort out winners and losers. Right. But this bill wasn't about that. It was about re-landscaping a playing field that was never flat in the first place, and never will be, as long as Congress is in charge of it. |
| | Fortunately, the Net isn't in that playing field. Just the "last mile" of it is, as long as that mile runs through cable or phone companies. |
| | The Internet is not a phone service, and it isn't a TV channel. It can run on anything you can tack on poles, pull through conduit or transmit through the aether. |
| | We'll never get Net Neutrality from the carriers, from lawmakers or from regulators. But we can get it from each other, in the form of new businesses that can grow skyscrapers in the market holes the carriers choose to ignore. Let's start focusing on that. |
| | Oh, one more thing. The bill that passed the house flipped a large bird in the general direction of the nation's municipalities, which have held franchising authority over local video services for a long time. There are cases to be made against that authority, and the carriers have been doing a good job making them. But, as Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local. Nothing is more local than a customer who wants a choice between something more than the two usual suspects, and watches Congress reduce that choice. That's what just happened. And it will backfire on the carriers. |
Shinkick
Identifying topics for the Identity Mashup
| | Mashing Up a Commons is new essay I just put up over at Linux Journal. It's a pretty big one: almost 3,000 words. But asks a big question: Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet? |
| | The short answer, I think, is no. |
| | Creative Commons and related efforts have gone a long way toward building out the kind of infrastructure we need before the Net is a truly public space, rather than a vast collection of private ones. But we need more. |
| | I have some ideas about that, which I think are good to bring up ten days in advance of the Identity Mashup, which the Berkman Center is putting on at Harvard Law School. I'll be participating in that, and in Cambridge that whole week (although I'm mighty tempted to head West for Bloggercon). And I thought, given the speed at which things are moving toward Identity 2.0, the Identity Metasystem — or whatever else we end up calling it — that it would be good to start talking ahead of time about some of the ideas that we'll bring up there. Talking, that is, out here in The Commons. Or whateve we have that passes for one. |
discuss
|
|
Richard Bennett - Net neutrality is a fuzzy mess
6/10/2006; 7:30:27 AM (reads: 1211, responses: 1)
|
|
|
If you want to get a grass-roots movement "energized", as they say, you feed them a lot of red meat. The "net neutrality" movement fed the bloggers and the blog-readers a lot of fear and smear about "First Amendment for the Internet", "Internet Freedom", "Walled Gardens", Tollbooths on The Info Superhighway" and "Gatekeepers in Cyberspace". They invented a fictitious history for the Internet around the sacred End-to-End principle and claimed that its Neutrality had always been protected by law according to a fanciful interpretation of Telecom regulation.
And then they marched into the halls of Congress and demanded that consumers of Internet bandwidth not be allowed to pay more to get more. The Markey Amendment and their other bills simply sought to enact a ban on "Enhanced Service" for a surcharge. So they talked all this crap about consumer choice and then asked for a reduction in consumer choice. This isn't fancy rhetoric, it's the facts.
The net neutrality movement doesn't have a real issue, they only have fears about some stuff that might happen someday if consumers can choose a service level or services companies pay an extra price for them to have premium service. This isn't about faster web sites, it's about Voice over IP and Video over IP. They're completely insane.
All the rhetoric about preventing change to the Internet didn't help either. Technology is all about change and consumers don't see change as a burden. The Internet itself is a big change to the way we used to communicate with each other and get information, and it's been a good one.
And then they denied any desire to regulate the Internet at the same time they offered a really onerous regulatory framework that went down to the packet level. The law has never regulated packet queuing before, so this was clearly unprecedented. So all they succeeded in doing was to get a lot of pretty simple-minded people all scared that the government and the Telcos were going to take their blogs away. It was a completely shameful exercise.
If you want Congress to respond to your issues, you have to be at least somewhat honest about what you want. If you want regulation, ask for regulation and propose a reasonable framework, not a hatchet job that kills consumer choice.
The Internet has a bug in its design, and that bug is the end-to-end kludge. Every network needs to protect itself from overload, and the only mechanism the Internet has for doing this is bound up in the TCP protocol. The new real-time applications such as IPTV and VoIP don't use TCP and they aren't "end-to-end", they're streaming. We know how to engineer networks to mix streaming with stop-and-wait, and end-to-end isn't the way. And it certainly can't work if you don't use it.
People need to let go of the idea that the design of Vint Cerf's Internet is some sort of religious icon that takes us to Jerusalem because it lacks the interior link management that's typical of fully-functional real-time networks. The Internet has produced some great social advantages, not because of how it's built, just because it's there.
As we move forward, we'll either bring the Internet along or we'll drop it in favor of some other approach. The backward-looking habit of so many bloggers and Internet lovers is an impediment to progress that tilts the deck in favor of leaving the Internet.
We can either wake up and fix the net, or we can stand back and watch it decay and ultimately die because it's no longer good enough. I'd prefer to fix it, but not many big blogging dudes are with me. I can't help but think that's a shame.
discuss
|
|
Doc Searls - Re: Net neutrality is a fuzzy mess
6/10/2006; 9:49:55 PM (reads: 1543, responses: 0)
|
|
|
I think you'd get more blogging dudes to join you if they could see a fix for the Net that doesn't reduce to "make way for the carriers to do what they want." The carriers may deliver some Internet service, but have a history of either passivity or hostility to providing the high-quality broadband that customers want. Here in Santa Barbara we get hind-tit service from Verizon and Cox (our local phone and cable monopolies) that meters somewhere between ennui and contempt. One Cox guy told me recently that the Net is a minor concern for them, and that, basically, they don't care. Their game is TV, and maybe getting some phone business away from Verizon. Mostly they want to incrementally roll out Hi-def TV while protecting their monopoly from all threats.
I agree that most customers don't care whether the Net service they get is "end to end" or a mix of streaming and stop-and-wait, or whatever, as long as it gets them what they want, which is fat symmetrical, uncrippled broadband. Lots of leading customers -- the ones who need fast symmetrical Net service to build their own businesses -- would be glad to jump on any bandwagon that gets them that, no matter what it's called.
Are the carriers going to lead that bandwagon? Or are they just going to build out a big fiber-based network optimized for all they can imagine, which is high-def TV with a buy button? Looks to me like the latter. And as long as that's the case, few blogging dudes of any size will want to come along for the ride.
We need a new challenge here. One that's pro-business without being pro-monopoly (or duopoly). One that welcomes competition from all quarters. And one that respects the need for the Net to evolve and perform for everybody.
You're right that Net Neutrality failed because it looked back nostalgically on a construct that never was. Now we need something to look forward to. I don't see that coming from the carriers. Nor do I see it coming from anybody portraying the Net's users primarily as "consumers", and worse, as victims. Even when they are.
All the hope I see is on the local horizons. It's not sexy, but it might work.
discuss
|
|
|
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
