Change Is Part of the Internet's Design

Why would we ever be limited to a single Internet?

The advent of Cloud Computing brings us back to the days of dialing into various mainframes and minis.

Once a pipe is established to an end node, that end node can connect us to any number of proprietary or public networks.

Does everything have to be accessible via tcp/ip?   It's a very limited design in many ways.

With my Clear Wimax connection, perhaps there could be any number of end points "in the air" that I can utilize, each with a unique design through many OSI layers.

NN regulations are frequently justified on the basis of "keeping" content from one source equal in access speed and price with content from all other sources, but this desire is reflected neither in the structure of the regulations nor in the way the Intenet delivers content today. Content producers who have the money to pay Akamail to host their content close to consumer enjoy a speed and quality advantage over those who host their content farther away; the Internet is not neutral in this sense. And those like Google/YouTube who can afford to build their own closed content delivery network buy an additional advantage for themselves. So the question about double-paying is whether small content producers can have the option of buying content caching services from the destination ISP or only from Akamai et. al.

When you enact a ban on ISPs offering CDN services, you don't create a level playing field for mom and pop, you reinforce the advantage that large players like Google/YouTube enjoy by having paid $20B for their closed, private network.

There are so many issues tied into this.  For one, not all net neutrality advocates are bullish on keeping all-you-can-eat plans.  They are different issues that share a wide overlap of people, but I don't think they should be comingled.

Most of us NN folks are concerned not about different applications being treated differently (though there are many who are) but are most concerned about some content being treated differently than other content of the same application type because a carrier wants to charge some content producers twice for access to "the carrier's" subscribers.  This is the heart of the NN debate, whether applications should be treated differently as a class is perhaps the stomach...

The question is whether I, as a subscriber, will have traffic treated the same if I visit Google video as if I go to Fox video or if my carrier can make deals with one or the other to favor that video content and thereby hurt the openness of the Internet and the meritocracy we have (though it remains imperfect even with NN magically guaranteed, I will agree).

Different people seem to be reading different subtexts into the Chairman's speech. His concessions about managing congestion and attacks were good and necessary, but leave all the questions open. A lot of the net neutrality debate is about pricing models: NN advocates would like to keep all-you-can-eat pricing, as would most consusmers, but now that there's so much diversity in resource consumption it's hard to see how it can survive without active management.

If network operators could lower the priority of P2P traffic, for example, it wouldn't be an impairment to people using video calling services like Skype. But there's not a well-accepted and uniform way to recognize P2P except DPI, and nobody likes that option (except the DPI vendors, of course.)

This tells me we have some more enigneering to do before the Internet is ready to meet the future.

The whole broadband initiative, at least on the government side, seems a wee bit out of touch with technological reality. It's high time we in the U.S. demanded that lawmakers get a grip on the technology they're legislating instead of thinking they get it and missing the nuances.

The FCC speech seems to indicate that there is some movement toward understanding that the Internet isn't a static resource that simply has to be extended further via the telecom infrastructure in order to please all parties.