Tag Archives: Web

Neutrality for thee, but not for me

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, I address the once-again raging topic of “net neutrality” regulation of the Web. On September 21, new FCC chair Julius Genachowski proposed more formal neutrality regulations. Then on September 25, AT&T accused Google of violating the very neutrality rules the search company has sought for others. The gist of the complaint was that the new Google Voice service does not connect all phone calls the way other phone companies are required to do. Not an earthshaking matter in itself, but a good example of the perils of neutrality regulation.

As the Journal wrote in its own editorial on Saturday:

Our own view is that the rules requiring traditional phone companies to connect these calls should be scrapped for everyone rather than extended to Google. In today’s telecom marketplace, where the overwhelming majority of phone customers have multiple carriers to choose from, these regulations are obsolete. But Google has set itself up for this political blowback.

Last week FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new rules for regulating Internet operators and gave assurances that “this is not about government regulation of the Internet.” But this dispute highlights the regulatory creep that net neutrality mandates make inevitable. Content providers like Google want to dabble in the phone business, while the phone companies want to sell services and applications.

The coming convergence will make it increasingly difficult to distinguish among providers of broadband pipes, network services and applications. Once net neutrality is unleashed, it’s hard to see how anything connected with the Internet will be safe from regulation.

Several years ago, all sides agreed to broad principles that prohibit blocking Web sites or applications. But I have argued that more detailed and formal regulations governing such a dynamic arena of technology and changing business models would stifle innovation.

Broadband to the home, office, and to a growing array of diverse mobile devices has been a rare bright spot in this dismal economy. Since net neutrality regulation was first proposed in early 2004, consumer bandwidth per capita in the U.S. grew to 3 megabits per second from just 262 kilobits per second, and monthly U.S. Internet traffic increased to two billion gigabytes from 170 million gigabytes — both 10-fold leaps. New wired and wireless innovations and services are booming.

All without net neutrality regulation.

The proposed FCC regulations could go well beyond the existing (and uncontroversial) non-blocking principles. A new “Fifth Principle,” if codified, could prohibit “discrimination” not just among applications and services but even at the level of data packets traversing the Net. But traffic management of packets is used across the Web to ensure robust service and security.

As network traffic, content, and outlets proliferate and diversify, Washington wants to apply rigid, top-down rules. But the network requirements of email and high-definition video are very different. Real time video conferencing requires more network rigor than stored content like YouTube videos. Wireless traffic patterns are more unpredictable than residential networks because cellphone users are, well, mobile. And the next generation of video cloud computing — what I call the exacloud — will impose the most severe constraints yet on network capacity and packet delay.

Or if you think entertainment unimportant, consider the implications for cybersecurity. The very network technologies that ensure a rich video experience are used to kill dangerous “botnets” and combat cybercrime.

And what about low-income consumers? If network service providers can’t partner with content companies, offer value-added services, or charge high-end users more money for consuming more bandwidth, low-end consumers will be forced to pay higher prices. Net neutrality would thus frustrate the Administration’s goal of 100% broadband.

Health care, energy, jobs, debt, and economic growth are rightly earning most of the policy attention these days. But regulation of the Net would undermine the key global platform that underlay better performance on each of these crucial economic matters. Washington may be bailing out every industry that doesn’t work, but that’s no reason to add new constraints to one that manifestly does.

— Bret Swanson

End-to-end? Or end to innovation?

In what is sure to be a substantial contribution to both the technical and policy debates over Net Neutrality, Richard Bennett of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has written a terrific piece of technology history and forward-looking analysis. In “Designed for Change: End-to-End Arguments, Internet Innovation, and the Net Neutrality Debate,” Bennett concludes:

Arguments for freezing the Internet into a simplistic regulatory straightjacket often have a distinctly emotional character that frequently borders on manipulation.

The Internet is a wonderful system. It represents a new standard of global cooperation and enables forms of interaction never before possible. Thanks to the Internet, societies around the world reap the benefits of access to information, opportunities for collaboration, and modes of communication that weren’t conceivable to the public a few years ago. It’s such a wonderful system that we have to strive very hard not to make it into a fetish object, imbued with magical powers and beyond the realm of dispassionate analysis, criticism, and improvement.

At the end of the day, the Internet is simply a machine. It was built the way it was largely by a series of accidents, and it could easily have evolved along completely different lines with no loss of value to the public. Instead of separating TCP from IP in the way that they did, the academics in Palo Alto who adapted the CYCLADES architecture to the ARPANET infrastructure could have taken a different tack: They could have left them combined as a single architectural unit providing different retransmission policies (a reliable TCP-like policy and an unreliable UDP-like policy) or they could have chosen a different protocol such as Watson’s Delta-t or Pouzin’s CYCLADES TS. Had the academics gone in either of these directions, we could still have a World Wide Web and all the social networks it enables, perhaps with greater resiliency.

The glue that holds the Internet together is not any particular protocol or software implementation: first and foremost, it’s the agreements between operators of Autonomous Systems to meet and share packets at Internet Exchange Centers and their willingness to work together. These agreements are slowly evolving from a blanket pact to cross boundaries with no particular regard for QoS into a richer system that may someday preserve delivery requirements on a large scale. Such agreements are entirely consistent with the structure of the IP packet, the needs of new applications, user empowerment, and “tussle.”

The Internet’s fundamental vibrancy is the sandbox created by the designers of the first datagram networks that permitted network service enhancements to be built and tested without destabilizing the network or exposing it to unnecessary hazards. We don’t fully utilize the potential of the network to rise to new challenges if we confine innovations to the sandbox instead of moving them to the parts of the network infrastructure where they can do the most good once they’re proven. The real meaning of end-to-end lies in the dynamism it bestows on the Internet by supporting innovation not just in applications but in fundamental network services. The Internet was designed for continual improvement: There is no reason not to continue down that path.

Political Noise On the Net

With an agreement between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN (the nonprofit Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, headquartered in California) expiring on September 30, global bureaucrats salivate. As I write today in Forbes, they like to criticize ICANN leadership — hoping to gain political control — but too often ignore the huge success of the private-sector-led system.

How has the world fared under the existing model?

In the 10 years of the Commerce-ICANN relationship, Web users around the globe have grown from 300 million to almost 2 billion. World Internet traffic blossomed from around 10 million gigabytes per month to almost 10billion, a near 1,000-fold leap. As the world economy grew by approximately 50%, Internet traffic grew by 100,000%. Under this decade of private sector leadership, moreover, the number of Internet users in North America grew around 150% while the number of users in the rest of the world grew almost 600%. World growth outpaced U.S. growth.

Can we really digest this historic shift? In this brief period, the portion of the globe’s population that communicates electronically will go from negligible to almost total. From a time when even the elite accessed relative spoonfuls of content, to a time in the near future when the masses will access all recorded information.

These advances do not manifest a crisis of Internet governance.

As for a real crisis? See what happens when politicians take the Internet away from the engineers who, in a necessarily cooperative fashion, make the whole thing work. Criticism of mild U.S. government oversight of ICANN is hardly reason to invite micromanagement by an additional 190 governments.

Net Neutrality forever! Wait, never mind…

When you’ve written as much as I have about the weird Web topic known as “network neutrality,” this is big news indeed.

The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

What some innocuously call “equal network access,” others call meddlesome regulation. Net neutrality could potentially provide a platform for Congress and the FCC to micromanage everything on the Net, from wires and switches to applications and services to the bits and bytes themselves. It is a potentially monstrous threat to dynamic innovation on the fast-growing Net, where experimentation still reigns. 

But now Google, a newly powerful force in Washington and Obamaland, may be reversing course 180-degrees. The regulatory threat level may have just dropped from orange to yellow.

Update: Richard Bennett expertly comments here.

Technology: 2008 vs. 1992

See my comparison of the state of technology in 2008 versus 1992, when the last Democratic presidential transition took place. 

Today, an average consumer can buy a terabyte hard drive (1 million megabytes), on which she might store her family photos, videos and other digital documents for as little as $109.99. In 1992, a terabyte drive, if such a thing had existed, would have cost $5 million.

Go to Forbes.com for the full article: “How Techno-creativity Will Save Us.”

Update: Obama’s Digital Campaign

A few days after the election, I wrote about President-elect Obama’s decentralized entrepreneurial campaign, which fully exploited the Web and trusted people at the edge. Here’s a post-election debrief from the technology team — the so-called Triple-O — that made it happen. They offer a final tally of metrics:

— two million “MyBO” Web-volunteer profiles

— 13 million e-mail addresses

— more than half a billion dollars raised online

— three million online donors gave 6.5 million donations

— average online contribution of $80

— more than 200,000 volunteer-organized offline events

As I pointed out, this innovative “capitalist” campaign clashed with many of Obama’s tax-regulate-and-centralize policy proposals. We’ll see if the new President learns anything from his successful campaign and puts it to use reigniting the economy.

Obama’s Entrepreneurial Lesson

From my article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

If Barack Obama ran for president by calling for a heavier hand of government, he also won by running one of the most entrepreneurial campaigns in history.

Will he now grasp the lesson his campaign offers as he crafts policies aimed at reigniting the national economy? Amid a recession, two wars, and a global financial crisis, will he come to see that unleashing the entrepreneur is the best way to raise the revenue he needs for his lofty priorities?

Read the whole op-ed here, and listen to a brief radio interview here.