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Net neutrality is a fuzzy mess
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. There are responses to this message:
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