net neutrality

Google snubs UK’s first Net Neutrality debate

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The first significant Net Neutrality debate to take place in the UK was held today at Westminster. Chaired by former trade minister Alun Michael and the Conservative shadow trade minister Charles Hendry, the event attracted the chief Telecoms regulator and ministry policy chief, a clutch of industry representatives, and a sprinkling of members of both … Read more

PacketExchange’s counterpoint to Neutrality hysteria

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Networks need to get smarter, says PacketExchange’s Kieron O’Brien, in a sharp counterpoint to the “Net Neutrality” hysteria.

PacketExchange bypasses the congestion of the internet by offering its customers a private end-to-end network. Some of its customers, such as Nokia, Microsoft, and cable ISP Telewest (now owned by Virgin) aren’t so surprising. But last week it added social networking site Bebo to its client list.

But look at what Bebo does, O’Brien told us. You’ll see why it wanted to bypass the net too.

For most internet users at home uploads are far from optimal – and Bebo users like to upload stuff, like photos and clips. They’re very model “Web 2.0 citizens”, if you like.

Which is where it runs into today’s network – and trouble.

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Spontaneous human combustion: Skype to blame

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A Voice over IP service was to blame for a man in Massachusetts bursting into flames at the weekend.

The man, David Reed, held an executive position at Lotus in the early 1980s, and was a Fellow at HP Labs. He is said to be recovering from the spontaneous human combustion at MIT Media Lab, where he’s on the faculty – and where, we hope, the presence of alarm clocks that run away from people shouldn’t hinder his recovery.

David Reed

We’re speaking figuratively, of course.

Reed was responding to a discussion on David Farber’s IP list that prompted by last week’s publicity stunt by Skype. We reported this here, but to summarize: Skype, notorious as a closed system, asked the FCC to open its networks to so any device can be attached (which it already can), and create a new standards body so it could nobble the cellular operators’ own standards bodies, and tell them what to do. A fine case of the pot calling the kettle black, we suggested.

But the discussion rapidly turned into a conflagration.

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Google – this internet won’t scale

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Google’s TV chief has admitted the internet is crap for TV. Speaking to the Cable Europe Congress in Amsterdam, Vincent Dureau told attendees:

“The web infrastructure, and even Google’s [infrastructure]…doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.”

Dureau, is head of TV technology at the ad giant. He candidly admitted that his own YouTube video service was part of the problem.

Engineers point to two different problems with today’s internet. The bandwidth is too low, but more acutely, latency and “jitter” mean the quality of the viewing experience is severely compromised. If an email program, or even one of Google’s YouTube’s Flash-based movies is forced to wait for a second, no one notices. But if a movie keeps hiccuping, no one will use the service again.

Adding to the dilemma is the question of who will invest to fix these problems – and who will end up paying for that investment?

Deloitte and Touche’s recently-published Telecoms Predictions report for 2007 contains a gloomy prediction that escaped almost everyone’s attention. Deloitte’s authors touch on the economics of the “net neutrality” debate, with respect to investment, advising partisans to calm down.

“Clearly, something has to change in the economics of internet access, such that network operators and ISPs can continue to invest in new infrastructure and maintain service quality, and consumers can continue to enjoy the internet as they know it today.”

That caught the attention of pundits. The conclusion, however, didn’t.

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Robert Kahn on Net Neutrality

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Robert Kahn, the most senior figure in the development of the internet, has delivered a strong warning against “Net Neutrality” legislation.

Speaking to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California at an event held in his honour, Kahn warned against legislation that inhibited experimentation and innovation where it was needed.

Kahn rejected the term “Net Neutrality”, calling it “a slogan”. He cautioned against dogmatic views of network architecture, saying the need for experimentation at the edges shouldn’t come at the expense of improvements elsewhere in the network.

(Kahn gently reminded his audience that the internet was really about interconnecting networks, a point often lost today).

“If the goal is to encourage people to build new capabilities, then the party that takes the lead is probably only going to have it on their net to start with and it’s not going to be on anyone else’s net. You want to incentivize people to innovate, and they’re going to innovate on their own nets or a few other nets,”

“I am totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net,” he said.

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How AT&T chewed up, and spat out Net Neutrality

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“It sure would be nice, but it doesn’t have much chance of happening because of market power, size, etc. I think it would be real hard to do. I don’t think the regulators would let that happen, in my judgment.” – Ed Whitacre on the possibility of taking over BellSouth, 2005.

The definition of a Southern Gentleman, it’s said, is someone so charming they can hand you your guts back on a plate – and you thank them.

If that’s the case, then AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre can have few peers in the charm sweeps. Whitacre has dispatched potential opposition to AT&T’s corporate expansion with the insouciance of a lion swatting a fly with its tail. Victory was complete shortly before the New Year, when the FCC agreed to Whitacre’s second mega-merger in the space of two years without hampering the emerging behemoth. The US regulator signed off on the AT&T-BellSouth merger that Whitacre himself had said he thought impossible, only 15 months earlier.

It’s been a masterpiece of misdirection. Whether by happy accident or design, Whitacre sent the opposition down a dead end, focusing its attention on a non-issue – or more accurately, an “issue” he himself created. The FCC applied the coup de grace with just one one sentence on December 29.

As the product of a series of mergers, AT&T now employs over 300,000 people and turns over $115bn in revenue – eleven Googles, or four Intels. The deal signed off by the FCC over the holidays also gives AT&T full control of Cingular, the United States’ second largest cellular network. Can there be anyone happier in the telecoms business tonight than Whitacre?

In a decade, American consumers have seen the number of Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or Baby Bells, coalesce from six down to just three: the odd man out, Qwest, the RBOC which covers the sparsely populated Mountain states, is surely next on AT&T’s menu.

The extraordinary thing is that all this took place at a time in the wake of the fall out from the telecoms bubble. The Bells enjoyed little affection from the public in any case, long before Global Crossing and MCI. and with an unpopular Republican President, Democrats can have been expected to push a few populist buttons, and hear some bells.

What actually happened is that Whitacre got everything he wanted, but only thanks to the aid of The Democratic Party, most of whom aren’t aware how thoroughly they’ve been outwitted.

Now that’s style.

Let’s see how he did it.

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Old net geezers play trip-you-up

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Cerf and Farber

The rolling net “neutrality” debate brought two of the internet’s most distinguished elder statesmen together in mortal combat this week. The two gentlemen, Vint Cerf and Dave Farber, said they agreed on most things. But where they didn’t, they tried to pull the chair away just as their opponent tried to sit down.

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The New Paranoid style in American politics

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The most interesting thing to emerge from the so-called ‘Net Neutrality’ bid had nothing to do with telecomms technology or policy. It’s the startling and, at the same time, banal fact that paranoia has become the default flavour of politics on the net.

Phantoms fight phantoms, here. When the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous 1964 essay for Harpers, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, he was inspired by the anti-Catholic fervour of the John Birch Society, and the anti-Communism of Senator McCarthy, which he saw embodied in Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. These were old trends which were merely a reoccurrence. Hofstadter observed –

“The paranoid is a double sufferer since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

The “Net Neutrality” campaign – which created little excitement except on the outer fringes of the web – suggests that the left is now just as capable of being haunted by paranoid fantasies as the right.

What the internet has achieved, with its twisty maze of echo chambers all alike, is a rapid acceleration of this paranoid discourse, which expels nuanced and complex reasoning.

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A neutral net is a neutered net?

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So-called “network neutrality” legislation hampers innovation and harms business and the public, Verizon’s chief spokesperson said this week. Tom Tauke, Verizon’s executive VP of public affairs, said in a speech that efforts to legislate against discrimination would hamper the take up of multi-tier network applications such as VPNs.

“The hospital that wants to provide home health monitoring for a heart patient is not going to rely on the internet,” he said.

Net neutrality advocates fear that the Bell telephone company – now reborn in the shape of Verizon and AT&T – will restrict the services that can be run on the open internet, and charge internet companies more for their bandwidth as they seek to compete with cable. The old Bells say that in order to deliver new services such as TV and movies on demand, they need to be able to discriminate between packets. With fiber offering the potential of 10x to 20x connections that today’s broadband, they add, there’s plenty of bandwidth to go round. We’ll come on to quite how much in a moment.

Tauke rebuffed the idea that Verizon would punish internet companies, saying it made as much sense for the telcos to cripple the net as it did for coffee shops to replace their premium bestseller with a cheap and nasty brand. They’d go out of business if they pulled that stunt, he said.

It’s the oddest of odd debates. On the one side former deregulation enthusiasts have been rushing to write new laws and regulations. On the other side, the Bell Heads, so often mocked by the Net Heads for their reactionary disdain to new technology, can justifiably claim that they’re investing in innovation.

To the average Joe, innovation looks like video on demand – or a faster internet connection. To the Net Heads, innovation means Vonage and Skype. The VoIP services are something the telcos would dearly like eliminate, as they introduce a wildcard into the pricing, but they know they can’t, so they’ll settle for the next best thing, control.

“The plain truth is that today’s access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect,” Tauke said. “Building out America’s internet and broadband infrastructure will require billions more in private capital investment.”

In that, he’s correct, of course. The passion behind “network neutrality” is largely based on a fear of price gouging, which given the Baby Bells track record, is entirely justifiable. AT&T boss Whitacre sees Google as freeloading on his network and has hinted he wants to charge the internet companies more.

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