Here are some comments I received in an e-mail list responding to the recent net neutrality announcement from the White House. Some of the technical points are beyond my knowledge, but I thought others might find this interesting. [begin quote] Its important to note some egregious false statements in the Presidents speech: * The Internet was not founded on net neutrality (a term that was not coined until the Internet was at least 20 years old), nor has it ever actually been neutral. The original NSFNet routers (called Fuzzballs), whose development was funded with government money, intentionally discriminated in favor of time-sensitive protocols such as Telnet and made the Internet work better for allusers. * No Internet provider has ever censored or blocked legal, third party content. Were any to do so, the markets reaction would be strong and swift, obviating the need for government intervention. * There is no such thing as a slow lane in a network connection, because a customers connection does not have lanes; all of the packets travel single file. However, large companies such as Google already have their nationwide networks of fiber and data centers that speed data directly to last mile providers. To the extent that they do, they already have fast lanes that small content providers cannot duplicate unless they can rent similar facilities from ISPs. Network neutrality regulation would not put these newcomers on a level playing field with incumbent monopolists but would, rather, prevent them from competing with them. Thus, so-called network neutrality regulations in fact enforce non-neutrality, which is why they are supported so strongly by incumbent monopolists. [end quote]
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 01:46:59 +0000
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