Pardon my while I laugh my ass off. On the Internet, every packet slows down every other packet in any part of its path. That’s the nature of packet switching, and the guy who sends the most packets degrades other users the most. The point of priority schemes is to limit the degradation that high-volume users cause low-volume users. Google bottlenecks my traffic today, but with a priority-based network, I can limit the damage it does to my voice and video streams. That’s the way it should be.

Regulation is part technical and part policy, and if you’re ignorant in either area you should stay out of it.

Now, if a company, say AT&T, decides that it will bottleneck its competitor’s traffic, or promote its own in some way, then we need to evaluate if this company should be allowed to be a large part of the internet backbone.

The faux neutrality bigots are opposing progress, new technology, that sort of thing, just like the candle-makers opposed electric lights.

So who’s the curmudgeon, Newmark or McCurry?

I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means.

Jeff,

Carr is more a grump than a curmudgeon.

As the universe of applications has grown, the original conception of IP neutrality has dated: for IP was only neutral among data applications. Internet networks tend to favor, as a class, applications insensitive to latency (delay) or jitter (signal distortion). Consider that it doesn’t matter whether an email arrives now or a few milliseconds later. But it certainly matters for applications that want to carry voice or video. In a universe of applications, that includes both latency-sensitive and insensitive applications, it is difficult to regard the IP suite as truly neutral as among all applications.

This point is closely linked to questions of structural separation. The technical reason IP favors data applications is that it lacks any universal mechanism to offer a quality of service (QoS) guarantee. It doesn’t insist that data arrive at any time or place. Instead, IP generally adopts a “best-effort” approach: it says, deliver the packets as fast as you can, which over a typical end-to-end connection may range from a basic 56K connection at the ends, to the precisely timed gigabits of bandwidth available on backbone SONET links. IP doesn’t care: it runs over everything. But as a consequence, it implicitly disfavors applications that do care.

Contrast that to the claim by Craig Newmark that the advocates of the Sensenbrenner/ Lofgren Internet regulation bill seek only to preserve a “level playing field” for all applications, bearing in mind that the bill in question bans QoS mechanisms.

Is Newmark a liar or merely an idiot? You decide.

H.G. Wells put it best when he said:

“New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, he humiliating question arises, ‘Why then are you not taking part in them?’”

regards,
David