The offices of Kind and Boucher are refusing to release the official, final copy of the letter because, as one staffer told me, they “don’t want the cable companies calling other Congressional signatories of the letter….”

The FCC claims they haven’t received the letter yet, but the Congressional staffer said it was sent. I need the official version with all Congressional names. Any ideas? Does anyone have access to this?

Thanks.

Craig

So the topic under discussion is: “Application Neutrality: Friend, Foe, or Figment”.

Dodging right along,

RB

“legislative bodies are generally so busy addressing actual problems”

are you suggesting that since the FCC is really busy, then the public should withold any concerns for future ?

If you see the footnote #3 in the letter, they recognize that pure neutrality is not the expectation. It’s goal is not Utopia, so you can’t call it such.

p.s. I knew you’d try to dodge the telephone questions I asked.

And yes, I do have a problem with regulation for its own sake. There are an infinite number of “what if” scenarios that might justify regulation, but regulatory and legislative bodies are generally so busy addressing actual problems they don’t have time for merely theoretical ones.

The question of principle raised by the insistence on “application neutrality” is whether all applications are equally legitimate. I don’t personally accept that as a principle, and offer the examples of illegal applications in support of my position: spam, viruses, and file-stealing violate the law, over and above the harm they do to the network. They’re therefore not legitimate, and therefore there is no “application neutrality” principle embedded in the Internet of today that needs regulatory protection.

It’s really pretty simple.

Only the net/computer savy ever notice this and change it. Average home users don’t know that they can change these things or that there are other places to get content.

This leads to a creeping lock in of users to “desired” content. Why go to another news page when it counts in your bandwidth tally.

Doesn’t seem bad on the surface, but when those that control the network also end up controlling the content, it will be a very bad situation indeed. One not dissimilar to the current woeful traditional media outlets of print and tv.

I *know* you said that it’s not happening. I also don’t think you have tried to look for it. I also don’t know that you have done enough research to make a valid claim that it’s not happening.

I also don’t agree that it would be ‘corrected’ by the market. It would only be corrected in the market if (off the top of my head)

1-people were aware that it’s happening
2-people value having neutrality more than the non-neutral service they are getting
3-people knowing what neutrality even means.

and I see no guarantees in any of those, seeing how most Americans eat what they are fed.

Let me ask you this: is there an FCC rule that says that any phone number I dial has to be free of intentional interference or noise ? Would it be illegal for ATT to inject noise or artifacts if I called Walmart’s 1800 number, versus Target’s ? Or redirect me from one to the other ? Why or why not ? (I’m betting that you won’t comment at all on that)

What if you found out that they were ? On your phone ? Would you just say…’well, ATT just lost a customer, I’ll now try MCI’ ?

If you don’t like regulations period, then say so. Don’t start making comments that suggest only network architects know the best way to use networks. It’s just like software engineers thinking that they are UI designers or Human Factors engineers. It’s dumb, and only hurts use in the end.

The second argument, one that’s more clearly stated in the Lessig/Wu letter to the FCC, is that cable operators are banning certain applications the survival of which is essential to human progress and the advance of civilization on this planet. Examples of these applications are VPNs and home networks. Lessig and Wu go to great lengths to stretch Hush-a-Phone, a court decision against an AT&T ban on rubber cups on handsets, to cover home network restrictions. The analogy doesn’t work, for several reasons.

In the first place, in so far as some cable operators have policies about home networks, the intent of these policies is to capture revenue for the attachment of multiple computers to their systems. To the extent that the cable operator can tell that a network is attached I don’t see this as a bar to innovation and I don’t buy the notion that Microsoft needs federal regulation expressly preventing cable operators from limiting home networks in order for Bill Gates to enjoy a prosperous future. Home networks that employ insecure Wi-Fi effectively act has an Internet on-ramp for unauthorized users, depriving the cable companies of deserved revenue and violating legitimate customer agreements. When you layer VPNs over warchalking connections you also create an interesting national security scenario that I see no reason to tolerate.

Cable Internet is a profit-driven business, as Mr. Fuzzy points out. Cable operators need not give the service away to anyone who wants it for free, and they need not tolerate insecure Wi-Fi nets that give it away for free.

“Application neutrality” is not a concept enshrined in our Constitution, our statutes, or in our common law, and it has no standing in the sphere of Internet regulation. The attempt to find precedent for particular business models and methods of network management in obscure Computer Science papers and RFCs is nothing more than an attempt to force public policy in a direction that it need not take. It’s dishonest, it’s blind to technical realities, and I don’t like it.

Is that clear enough for you, Stewart?

“I�d prefer the FCC not get any more involved in the Internet than they already are” — there are some things you enjoy, Mir Bennett, as a consumer and network consultant, regarding the Internet, if it wasn’t for the FCC ‘meddling’ thus far.

Whether or not your experience has been with situations involving the said ‘abuses’ of neutrality does not mean that they haven’t existed, or still don’t.

You seem to be saying that this sort of thing:

1- doesn’t happen at all, because it’s not technically feasible
2- ummm…if it does, though, then it’ll all get worked out by the ‘market’
3- er….if it doesn’t, then we shouldn’t try to prevent it from happening in the future, because that’s silly, because it can’t happen, see #1.

so which is it ? what’s you’re final answer ? you don’t know, because you haven’t been looking for it, and I’m gonna guess you haven’t used every broadband option to investigate…it’s not a monopoly you know, there’s a lot of providers out there….

“those of us engaged in this work need the freedom to do our jobs without meddling by regulatory bodies or well-meaning bystanders.”

If you would do more reading, then you’d see that neutrality based on content (not on network layer, not on media, not on standard) should impose no barriers whatsoever. My local pacbell guy doesn’t care who I call on the phone (as long as it’s not illegal to do so), and the same should be with the Internet, period.

Mr. Wu — I would also love to see what you have thus far in the way of historical evidence of non-neutral network practices. Do you happen to have them for public consumption ?

For example, during the Blaster and SoBig epidemics, it appeared that Comcast blocked all ICMP PING packets for several days. Would this kind of overbroad restriction be permitted under (a)(3)? Similarly, several cable providers (including Sympatico.ca) block their users from accessing port 25 on any server but their own. Could this absurd regulation be permitted because it allows them to more easily prevent mass unsolicited email?

(a)(4) is rather unclear — is it intended to only allow removal of literal “delay” and “jitter” (if so, what does that mean?) or to allow the cable provider to ban anything that causes or contributes to it? It’s easy to make a case that video streaming, VoIP, and P2P file sharing all cause “delay”.

You might also consider promoting the use of fair queuing, instead of less application-neutral mechanisms, for managing bandwidth. For example, some universities have decided to prioritize Web and email traffic over Kazaa as a Quality of Service mechanism (i.e. to speed up Web traffic). Other simply cut off those who are using “too much” bandwidth. I suspect residential Internet providers already or will soon do the same thing. Fair queuing would allow users to make such decisions by giving each user an equal amount of bandwidth to “spend” on whatever applications they feel are important (of course, theoretically reserved but unused bandwidth is also distributed evenly).

I hope the Commission takes heed of your comments.

I understand that some cable operators have attempted to charge per-computer hookup fees, which is what I think you mistake for the kind of home network ban that justifies the strained extension of Hush-a-Phone to Internet regulation, and I understand that some cable operators may have had problems with VPNs in the era when the Clipper chip debate was hot, but that’s not an issue that ever affected the cable networks I’ve used. In any case, these sorts of practices relate to the desire of cable operators to turn a profit while complying with the law, and most of us in America aren’t opposed to capitalism or to the rule of law.

It appears that you and Prof. Lessig, while getting the mob all worked-up over imaginary encroachments, wish to impose architectural standards upon the cable companies’ Internet access networks which follow your understanding of some sort of “end-to-end” theory of access networks and an alternate form of that theory couched as “application neutrality”. The “end-to-end” architecture simply relates to a simple-minded theory of flow control and error detection/recovery that occurred to a particular group of computer science professors at MIT prior to the rollout of the TCP/IP Internet in 1982. That network was optimized for asynchronous, point-to-point applications that didn’t require jitter-free delivery and multicast addressing, and as more sophisticated applications have come to the fore with real-time requirements, we’ve learned that these design choices were neither neutral nor ideal. The reality is that there is no “neutral network”, either in practice or in principle, so it’s simply silly to demand the FCC or any other government body impose an unattainable goal on Internet access networks or in any other sphere. I’m sure your knowledge of common law extends far enough to realize that it’s wrong for the state to impose a burden on a citizen that he can’t carry.

The IP layer of the Internet protocol stack today favors asynchronous applications over isochronous ones, even though the undercarriage of both telephony and cable networks is capable of serving the needs of both types of applications. Network engineering in the near future will attempt to correct IP’s shortcomings, and those of us engaged in this work need the freedom to do our jobs without meddling by regulatory bodies or well-meaning bystanders.

I’d prefer the FCC not get any more involved in the Internet than they already are, and if they must meddle, they shouldn’t do so in the pursuit of quixotic or utopian goals. Cable networks have asymmetrical, point-to-multipoint architectures that certainly favor browsing over such applications as video-conferencing or Napster. Your proposal is in conflict with this architecture, which has been widely criticized and Lessig and his minions. Given the history of this criticism, the agenda is clear, and, in my opinion, counter-productive.