[Sosfbay-discuss] "Congress Poised to Unravel the Internet"

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

>Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2006 13:18:17 -0700
>From: Gerry Gras <gerrygras at earthlink.net>
>User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US;
>	rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011126 Netscape6/6.2.1
>To: sosfbay-discuss at marla.cagreens.org
>Subject: [Sosfbay-discuss] "Congress Poised to Unravel the Internet"


>Another article about the end of "net neutrality":

>      http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0819-23.htm


>If I recall correctly, Cameron has said that he is not
>concerned about the potential changes, because he thinks
>it will help resuce spam and make people pay the appropriate
>costs.  Have I mistated this, Cameron?

Not even close.

There is no such thing as "net neutrality" and never has been.
It just wasn't an issue until now.

The Internet has been held together for its first thirty years
by contracts between its component networks known as
"transit and peering arrangements."  Those agreements created
an Internet which is no longer viable due to the appearance
of new, very large traffic sources.  Blockbuster, Itunes,
Vonage, Youtube, etc.  The backbone companies are being asked
to carry this commercial traffic for free, and they can't.
They want new transit and peering deals where Blockbuster
and Apple and Vonage pay for some of the huge load they're
creating in MCI's and Sprint's and AT&T's ("the core")
routing centers.  Remember there is more optical fiber between
these centers than anyone will know how to use for a long time.
The Internet's bottlenecks are the routers where those
lines come together.

Meanwhile, the telcos and cable TV cos that own "the edge"
want to charge their competitors (Vonage and Skype...)
for some of the load they're creating in the Internet's
periphery, mostly for competitive reasons rather than
actual equipment overload.

This new commercial traffic represents tens of thousands of times
more data than email or conventional Web access.
We either get new peering arrangements, or the Internet falls
apart because nobody is willing to pay for the way we want
to use it now.


>My primary concern is to what extent will these changes
>make it more difficult for average citizens and small groups
>to communicate with others.

The danger here is not loss of something which never existed.
It is the potential for politically motivated abuse of the
new peering arrangements that are going to replace the ones
in place now.  Once MCI gets a law that says it can charge
Vonage a reasonable rate for transit, if that same rate applies
to Commondreams and Greens.org, there is no problem.  The average
traffic out of my server petra-k over the last year amounts to
the traffic generated by about three Vonage calls.  Greens.org
and Commondreams would pay less under fair billing than we
pay now.  But if the law lets them charge Commondreams and
Greens.org a million times more per gigabit than they charge
Vonage, we're screwed.  Nobody's concerned MCI would "block"
(null route) Commondreams, we're concerned they'll price
Commondreams out of the medium.

Unfortunately, as usual, Greens and other progressives are
letting marketing operations like Moveon.com define this
debate for us, and they're twisting it beyond all recognition
to suit their own purposes.  Moveon sends unsolicited broadcast
email.  Recently, AOL proposed a scheme where its users would
be offered a miniscule discount for accepting such "legitimate"
spam.  "Legitimate" spammers would be the ones who pay AOL
for access to these users, and who comply with AOL's content rules.
Moveon made a big deal of that, calling it an "email tax"
and playing on consumer confusion about a long-running Internet
hoax about an FCC- or Postal Service-imposed email tax.
It's a completely unrelated issue.


The great majority of consumers will be content with whatever
playpen the cable TV and telcos design for them.  It'll be
colorful and noisy and really easy to use and they won't have to
make any decisions for themselves.  They just want
to download commercial music and videos and have cheap (if
unreliable) phone service.  Professionals who actually need
to communicate will, I suspect, create demand for a new
Internet that rides virtual circuits on top of the existing one.
The Internet of a few years ago will fit neatly through Secure Shell
connections across Comcast's edge fabric if it has to.

But this isn't new.  The Internet has been splitting off a cheap,
unthreatening (but not truly safe) consumer playpen for the
last dozen years.  This is just one more step in that process.

The problem we face, which I've
personally been able to make very little progress at, is
convincing Greens that the consumer playpen isn't good enough
and we need to be present on the grown-up side.
If "the end of net neutrality" brings the end of the benefits
we've gotten from the Internet recently, it will mostly be
by our own choice and our own fault.  The consequence of it
being socially acceptable to throw up one's hands and whine
"I'm not technical!"


If you want to worry about "losing the Internet," loss
of "net neutrality" is the wrong threat.  Worry about
Microsoft's Trusted Computing Initiative (formerly code named
Palladium) being mandated by Congress.  Palladium will make it almost
impossible to build the network we may one day have to build
inside the playpen.
Or it could cause the US' playpen to become isolated from the
free (freedom, not price) Internet of Europe and Latin America.
I half suspect "loss of net neutrality" is the false alarm
designed to make us complacent (or "confused") enough to accept
Palladium.
Please see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html


Cameron