Knight is Right

Nothing new here, but Sir Tim's wise words on Net neutrality have a weight that few others can match. Pass them on to your favourite telecoms company.

If Not Net Neutrality - What?

That old contrarian curmudgeon, Andrew Orlowski, has found a soul-mate in Richard Bennett: "[t]he veteran engineer played a role in the design of the internet we use today, and helped shaped Wi-Fi" as Orlowski explains before an interview. In addition,

Bennett argues that the measures proposed to 'save' the internet, which in many cases are sincerely held, could hasten its demise. Network congestion is familiar to anyone's whose left a BitTorrent client running at home, and it's the popularity of such new applications that makes better network management an imperative if we expect VoIP to work well. The problem, he says, is that many of the drafts proposed to ensure 'Net Neutrality' would prohibit such network management, and leave VoIP and video struggling.

The conversation that follows is extremely interesting, and certainly hits home. But I have big problems with this part:

They all seem to be worried that ISPs have secret plan to sell top rank - to pick a search engine that loads faster than anyone else's. But it's not clear that a), anyone has done that; b), that it's technically achievable; or c) that it is necessarily abusive; or d) that their customers would stand for it.

These all seems very weak arguments in against net neutrality; I'd rather err on the side of hippy edge-to-edge goodness.

Net Neutrality and Open Spectrum

David Levine has an interesting post that joins the dots connecting the net neutrality debate with the issue of creating a spectrum commons. I don't share his concerns about imposing net neutrality through legislation, but I certainly agree that breaking the last mile monopoly through wireless is ultimately a better solution. And while we're at it, let's try and get some global wireless meshes going too.

The Nitty-Gritty of Net Neutrality

Net neutrality - the idea that the underlying technologies of the Internet should never care or even know about the details of who you are or what you are doing with the data packets it is conveying - is much in the news lately, what with outrageous demands from telecommunications companies to be allowed to charge different rates for different traffic. If you ever had any doubts that we need Net neutrality, here's someone who might convince you, since he knows a thing or two about this area.

In Praise of Google Utopianism

An executive at one of the main US telecommunication companies, Verizon, has decried the fact that:

"The network builders [i.e. telecommunication companies] are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers."

Excuse me, isn't that what Google pays for when it buys connectivity to the Internet, and what you and I pay for when we sign up for Internet access (like here, for example)? So, in fact, the networks are already being paid twice for this service. Isn't that enough?

The only consolation is that this bizarre accusation has given birth to the rather wonderful concept of "Google Utopianism" to describe this state of affairs. Me? - I call that the latest incarnation of the Internet, personally, where those naughty "cheap servers" - mostly running GNU/Linux - are creating a vast range of exciting new services.

If that's Google Utopianism, you can call me Sir Thomas.