[ NNSquad ] Re: Dave Farber Warns Against Net Neutrality (Washington Post)I

[Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>]

The problem with turning the Internet over to the regulators at this 
point is two-fold, as I see it. In the first place, the Internet 
community hasn't done an adequate job of explaining the design rationale 
for the system as it exists today. You can see from my paper that basic 
concepts like end-to-end have been justified according to a multitude of 
different reasons. When we see this in tech specs, it's a clue that the 
principle in question is more a side-effect than a true principle. The 
"stupid network," end-point-heavy formulations are misleading. People 
treat the Internet like a network, because that's what they need. The 
architecture of an Internet is simply agnostic about questions of 
network reliability, traffic shaping, active queue management, and tiers 
of service simply because they're out of scope; they're network issues 
rather than Internetwork issues. An Internet isn't neutral or 
non-neutral; if anything, it's neutral about neutrality. The real 
rationale for the datagram network architecture was to create a space 
for experimentation; that's why everybody embraced it as soon as it was 
formulated. This internetting thing was actually a flop; we actually 
have one big network made of self-similar parts, not a bunch of 
different ones. Interconnection works best if everybody runs all the 
same protocols, so we do.

So when you ask the FCC and similar bodies in other countries to 
regulate the Internet, they will happily take the task, but they're 
simply going to fall back on their telephony models because lawyers are 
addicted to precedent and nobody has given them a better frame of 
reference. And once the regulators start making rules, you're going to 
lose the little bit of dynamism that's still in the Internet; how much 
technical progress has there been in the phone network since the 
Carterfone rules went down? Not a hell of a lot. I don't want the one 
big network frozen like a fly in amber just yet.

Vint Cerf wrote:
> Dave,
>
> I think some very serious effort is underway at FCC to be much more 
> precise about what is meant and measurable about the notion of 
> transparent and non-discriminatory service. I agree that clarity is 
> important here.  I think it is possible to achieve clarity and that it 
> is important that we attempt this because to ignore the problem space 
> is to leave the users very much at risk.
>
> vint
>
> On Sep 26, 2009, at 4:42 PM, David Farber wrote:
>
> > Vint,  believe you misinterpret what I said in writing and 
> > interviews. I have never said that regulation is not good. What I 
> > have said is that hazy  and ambiguous terms that have been used on 
> > dangerous to innovation.  Suppose you were about to build a new 
> > building and the regulations said it should be "reasonable", "open", 
> > "fair". An architect attempting to design such a building would face 
> > a very confused task. You may have the building  mostly built  and 
> > then find that your assumptions about what these terms mean were 
> > wrong. You may face lawsuits by your neighbors over what these terms 
> > mean as well as facing the need to sue the city etc.
> >
> > The bane of many such regulations is that all it does is to slow down 
> > innovation and create jobs for lawyers.
> >
> > I'd be happy to join a SMALL group which attempted to create a set of 
> > principles and a framework for regulation which avoided these pitfalls.
> >
> > Dave
> >
> > I have said often that leaving the future of the Internet to the 
> > Congress is even more dangerous. Witness the 96 act and what it did 
> > to the CLECs.
> > On Sep 26, 2009, at 7:51 AM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> >
> > I think Dave's position, which is largely unchanged, is that 
> > regulation is never right. Plainly, I disagree here and believe that 
> > it is entirely possible to establish a fair framework in which it is 
> > not necessary for broadband service providers to do anything more 
> > than manage congestion and allocation of capacity in a fashion 
> > commensurate with the service level to which the users have subscribed.
> >
> > vint
> >
> > On Sep 25, 2009, at 10:43 PM, Lauren Weinstein an architect
> > > Dave Farber Warns Against Net Neutrality (Washington Post)
> > >
> > > http://bit.ly/uAC2i  (Washington Post)
> > >
> > > --Lauren--
> > > NNSquad Moderator

--
Richard Bennett
Research Fellow
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Washington, DC