(As far as my credentials, I was one of the first 12 people to work on a little startup called @Home — itself a content caching business, optimizing data delivery via cable operators — starting in December 1993, as an employee for TCI Technology Ventures in partnership with Kleiner Perkins.)

To say that Google would start emulating what Akamai and Limelight have been doing for years is not correct — in fact, Google is and has been a world leader in content caching pretty much since its inception. And unlike Akamai, AWS, Limelight, etc. — which generally use HTTP to accelerate content on a fair and equal basis — Google routinely appends metadata to content which promotes its linking business.

Of course other companies could do it — if they could afford to, that is. A CDN costs billions to deploy in a positive economy. The recession has eviscerated network operator’s access to credit, making them more willing to contemplate a Faustian bargain, in essence granting preferential (or even most-favored nation) access without having to call it discriminatory access tiering. In return, the network operator gets cash and gets to decide how to prioritize Google’s access. While it doesn’t automatically lead to priority access, I’ve seen enough of these deals to know that they have the potential of degrading other communication streams, which is the premise that Net Neutrality advocates are most passionate about.

If Google were serious about maintaining its stance on network neutrality, they should render their access agreements transparent to the public, and demonstrate how they their implementation would support non-preferential FIFO access.

As to the substance of the post, it’s dead-on, the WSJ is grasping at straws. Their understanding of the issues is closer to “the Internet as a series of tubes” than a deep understanding of what is going on.

The Economist

Sure, and I argue that the ISP should have a default setting that should be overridden by the priority labels set by the application default or the consumer when they are within the priority budget they’ve paid for. We can’t assume that most consumers know how to set up QoS so there has to be reasonable defaults. QoS has to have reasonable budgets for varying levels of priority or else everyone would simply label 100% of their packets as top priority so they can get a leg up on everyone else. If you look at how QoS works in the market place, there are always contractual limits on how many packets can be labeled a certain class of priority.

The Markey type Net Neutrality bill (similar to Snowe/Dorgan), which Professor Lessig now clearly states he opposes, effectively breaks QoS because if everything has priority, then nothing has priority.

George imagines a network that prefers certain protocols because they are light and others because they are bulk, without regard for the fact that there’s nothing light or bulk about the protocols — it’s the content.

We use HTTP a lot today, and that’s because it’s better. Imagine what would happen if we still used Gopher today, and operators all prioritized Gopher. HTTP couldn’t win on a network that prioritized gopher.

The network must be neutral for natural winners to emerge. Efficiency at 8-ball isn’t in tilting the table, it’s in making the most holes in the fewest number of shots.

And before someone takes this oversimplification into a statement that QoS has no place on the Internet, that’s wrong. QoS (or ToS, DiffServ, etc.) has plenty of place — as long as it’s done IAW the Internet Standards — which tend to require the operators to respect the handling directives of the customers, not to decide these things for themselves.

Please take a look at this.

http://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/15/mainly-its-servants/

“You would think people who worry about the media would be able to spell Murdoch.”

You’d think someone must be unemployed and left without family to spend time posting idiotic nitpicking posts about spelling errors…

“Is this dingbat corner? The Captcha’s make more sense than a lot of posters on here.”

Well then it didn’t do a good job with you either – there’s nothing more pathetic than a loser who types up the post, types in his details, types in the Captcha etc but all this only to post a completely useless post about spelling errors while complaining about worthless posts…

…sweet irony – too bad your kind of dingbats are immune because your post was priceless!

…And still no comment from the WSJ or the authors? The Internet isn’t killing old media; old media is killing itself.