Running on Neutral
May 21st, 2007 by tkarrTwo leading thinkers at the intersection of technology and politics on Friday challenged all 2008 presidential candidates to adopt a comprehensive technical platform that includes protections for Net Neutrality and the expansion of open Internet access to available public spectrum.
Speaking during the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) Conference in New York, Andrew Rasiej said: “It’s time that high speed access to the Internet be recognized as a public good, like water, available to all Americans at a low cost.
 The Medium Is the Message |
In a release circulated later in the day, Rasiej, who runs PDF and TechPresident alongside editor Micah Sifry, called on candidates to “firmly support ‘Net Neutrality’ and forbid Internet service providers from discriminating among content based on origin, application or type.” The release added:
“By issuing this call, they are elevating the issue’s prominence in the election and asking voters to judge America’s next leader by how well he or she would accelerate the country’s conversion from the industrial age to the connected economy of the 21st century.”
“We’re calling on the next inhabitant of the White House to articulate more clearly where they stand and what they will do to bring the United States into the 21st century,” Sifry said Friday. “The Internet is the dial tone of the 21st century. If you aren’t connected, it’s as if you don’t have a phone.”
“Politicians still don’t know the difference between a server and a waiter,” Rasiej said during the conference “Technology shifts the power much more into the hands of the voter.” With this change, we need to be certain that citizen’s Web connection is not manipulated in ways that could discourage his or her participation.
Some in the race have already come out on neutrality. Let’s see how soon they take up other components of the PDF platform.
May 21st, 2007 at 5:16 pm
“forbid Internet service providers from discriminating among content based on origin, application or type”
As far as I know this goes well beyond what NN legislation like Snowe-Dorgan is calling for. Only discrimination based on who is sending/receiving (i.e. discriminatory QoS) is not permitted within NN legislation. Any non-discriminatory QoS (which looks only at application/type of packet without regard for who is sending/receiving) is perfectly legitimate and would not be prevented by NN legislation.
“Politicians still don’t know the difference between a server and a waiter”
Its seems to me that Rasiej and Sifry don’t know the difference between discriminatory and non-discriminatory QoS and are calling for candidates to support something that goes well beyond the Snowe-Dorgan NN legislation.
May 25th, 2007 at 6:38 am
Rasiej and Sifry are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT to call for NN legislation that “goes well beyond what NN legislation like Snowe-Dorgan is calling for.”
The distinction between discriminatory and non-discriminatory QoS is a lame cop to the now completely inadequate “services” based regulatory model of the analogue radio, television and telephone era. We’re in desperate need of serious regulatory reform to adapt to a digital infrastructure. Allowing telcos to build-out fiber for non-neutral “IPTV,” “AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled” or “Uber-super we’ll-do-anything-to-avoid-providing-commodity-bits-service service” would be a huge mistake and only lead to a litigated mush of poorly defined “services” that has been the telco’s bread and butter for decades. It’s why people like Harold Feld and Susan Crawford expressed serious doubts about the impact of the AT&T/BellSouth merger. Despite the enthusiasm for “non-discriminatory QoS” - which is as close to an oxymoron as I’ve encountered in any policy discussion - expressed on this site and in drafted bills like Snowe-Dorgan, Rasiej and Sifry are completely justified in saying it’s not enough.
Gary Bachula and other Next Generation Network leaders have repeatedly told us that QoS is NOT NECESSARY (we should all be familiar with Bachula’s Senate Commerce Committee testimony to that effect by now); apparently we’re just not very good at listening.
Winning battles at the expense of the war is bad strategy.
We need to push a LOT harder and for a bill that goes well beyond what’s being forwarded by Snowe-Dorgan.
May 25th, 2007 at 11:19 am
criticny - Thanks for bringing this information from Gary Bachula to light. I think Gary is correct in that these big telco’s should ultimately be providing end users with zero packet inspection bandwidth services and should leave the innovative manipulation of the data to the end users. Thats where we want to end up but whats the best way to get there?
It has been a difficult fight to get a significant number of our current representatives to support a snowe-dorgan type of NN legislation. Getting them to support something that will have a big impact on how the telco’s currently impliment their networks would be a much more difficult task. Hell, its been hard enough to get them to support something that has virtually no impact on the current telco networks so I can only imagine the intense activism required to get them to support legislation that has a huge impact on the current network but has the most benefit for the american people and innovative businesses.
Introducing legislation that prevents Telco’s from making use of “non-discriminatory” QoS (yeah its an oxymoron, but do you have a better way to differentiate QoS?) on their current backbone will open the door for the telco giants to present a semi legitimate gripe about the negatvie impact it has on their current network. Right now these giants have NO legitimate basis from which to attack the Snowe-Dorgan type of NN legislation because it would allow them to continue making use of the QoS they already have in place. So why not work on getting enough support to pass a Snowe-Dorgan type NN legislation and then gear up for a new fight (one that will be 10 times more difficult) to force the entire telco industry into a bandwidth only Internet-2 direction?
If we had a million informed citizens ready to fight the telcos by hitting the streets in DC if necessary then I would say lets kick some telco arse and force them to drop all current “legal” QoS within X amount of time and replace it with a bandwidth only model. But we don’t have anywhere close to that kind of organized and dedicated activism within our ranks. I say we first fight a battle we can actually win and then gear up to fight the battle which gets us to where we want to be.
Rasiej and Sifry may be right to call for NN legislation that “goes well beyond what NN legislation like Snowe-Dorgan is calling for” but is their timing right?