10 comments

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  Tim Lee

  1 year ago

  Berin, this strikes me as a rather loose analogy. While we talk about Adsense as an "ad network," it's not a network in the strict computer science sense of the term—i.e. it doesn't route other companies' packets. The argument for network neutrality is an argument about the Internet's TCP/IP architecture, not an argument that "discrimination" in general is bad.
  
  With regard to Gogo, I don't see how consumers benefit from having Gogo pick and choose which application receives priority treatment. It seems to me that consumers would benefit more from protocol-neutral traffic shaping that simply ensured that every customer got a roughly equal share of the bandwidth. Cusotmers who ran a lot of high-bandwidth applications would see their low-bandwidth applications slow to a crawl, while cusotmers who ran only low-bandwidth applications would have them work fine. Application-specific traffic shaping seems likely to be both paternalistic (because the customer might have different priorities than the ISP) and ineffective (because if it became widespread people would simply start camouflaging their disfavored traffic as favored traffic).
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  Micah Tillman

  1 year ago

  I suppose the question is: If the whole thing is kept as a roughly "survival of the fittest" arena, will Google's framing of "fit" as "fast" itself be fit enough to survive?
  
  And that, I suppose, depends on how many competitors Google has in the arena who are offering alternative interpretations of what it means to be "fit."
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  eee_eff

  1 year ago

  But if Google’s prioritization of its AdSense network is a good thing, should we not encourage other network operators to look for analogous ways to increase the operational efficiency of their networks through prioritization?
  
  No. Google's prioritization does not violate the end-to-end principle, and doesn't affect the workings of the internet infrastructure itself. Just because they have a contract that addresses the speed of a certain page does not mean that they interfere with the ability of anyone to read or access certain content. That's why everyone is so concerned about net neutrality--it would become a means of censorship, as has already happened numerous times.
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  Adam Thierer

  1 year ago

  Tim... You fail to appreciate how the debate over Net neutrality within the Beltway has moved far, far beyond that traditional definition. You are right about how the argument started, but not about where it currently stands or where it will end. Before long, any online operator who in anyway engages in any sort of preferential treatment or prioritization of anything will be accused of "discrimination" that should somehow be resolved through government regulation. It doesn't matter what type of "network" or layer of the Net we are talking about.
  
  That which haunts one type of provider or technology today will haunt them all tomorrow.
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  Tim Lee

  1 year ago

  Adam, with all due respect, most of the people I've seen muddy the water on this score are people trying to discredit the concept of network neutrality. Certainly we should be wary of the potential for regulatory mission creep. But I also think we should give our opponents credit where it's due. Network neutrality is a fuzzy concept, but it's not this fuzzy.
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  Brooke

  1 year ago

  Of course it's this fuzzy Tim, and recently, I don't think that it's the people trying to discredit neutrality who are muddying the waters for the most part.
  
  Our opponents--at least the loudest, most effective ones in the public debate--are the people who are still bringing up the AT&T/Pearl Jam incident and the Verizon/NARAL thing as proof positive that that there's a neutrality problem. I agree that Berin's analogy is a bit on the tortured side (though not outlandish), but Adam is right that the debate has shifted quite considerably in the last year and tortured reasoning is all the rage.
  
  Network architecture is, unfortunately, of little consequence to someone like Art Brodsky, who can prattle on for 600 words about how AT&T censoring its own content is a step in the direction of the decline and fall of the Internet. There may be credit due to proponents of the end-to-end principle, yourself among them, but my interest in giving credit to neutrality as a political concept is nill.
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  Mark Blafkin

  1 year ago

  Tim, I think you might want to rethink your argument for Gogo only using traffic shaping techniques that simply carve up the bandwidth into equal portions for every user. While seemingly 'democratic,' it would likely be an incredibly inefficient use of bandwidth. In fact, just read anything Google or NAF has ever written about spectrum, whitespace, and the need for unlicensed spectrum and you'll get the idea.
  Unless you're going to create an entire market system for trading spectrum from one passenger to another on flights, this would be an incredibly inefficient use of the spectrum.
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  Tim Lee

  1 year ago

  Brooke, that's a good point. There are certainly people muddying the waters on both sides. I don't think that's a reason to muddy them further, though. Tortured reasoning may be all the rage on the other side, but I don't think that means we ought to contribute to it.
  
  Mark, there's no reason per-user traffic shaping would degrade performance any more than per-application traffic shaping does. The router just needs to keep track of each user's bandwidth usage over some reasonable period and then respond to congestion by dropping packets of the heaviest users first.
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  eee_eff

  1 year ago

  Our opponents–at least the loudest, most effective ones in the public debate–are the people who are still bringing up the AT&T/Pearl Jam incident and the Verizon/NARAL thing as proof positive that that there’s a neutrality problem.
  
  Brooke: They way you say this, a casual reader might think the the Pearl Jam incident was a one off fluke. It was not, and it shows the goal of the corporate power infrastructure is to suppress dissent and legitmate political action.:
  
  http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/w...
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  eee_eff

  1 year ago

  Here's a list of bands censored:
  
  http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/i...
  
  Alleged: Nightwatchman (Tom Morello) @ Bonnaroo 2007 (Nightwatchman message board)
  Did anyone else watch The Nightwatchman live stream from bonnaroo? Everytime Tom began to talk the audio would cut out. I’m assuming that it wasnt just me.
  Alleged: Lupe Fiasco @ Lollpalooza 2007 (Pearl Jam message board)
  I actually missed the Pearl Jam set, but I saw Lupe Fiasco’s performance earlier in the day. He has a song called “American Terrorist”, and while the song itself seemed to go by untouched… Lupe’s lead in to the song was. It went something along the lines of “Some of you might know him as George W. Bush… The President. I know him as George W. Bush ___________ (dead air)”. Having seen Lupe in concert before, I know that muted out section was a “American Terrorist”. He pretty much yells it into the mic before launching into the song.
  Alleged: Lily Allen @ Bonnaroo 2007 (Lollapalooza message boards)
  They were definately censoring what Lily Allen was saying in between songs. When there are technical problems, the picture will stop and sometimes the word playlist above the buttons on the video screen will change to buffering. During Lily Allen my picture would keep playing fine and the sound was gone. The sound while the Roots were talking in between songs just cut out for the first time.
  Alleged: Ozomatli (and everyone else!) @ Coachella 2007 (MicheBella on Rotten Tomatoes)
  In nearly every band I watched, there was a moment when said band spoke to the crowd. Suddenly, the sound disappeared. I just watched Ozomatli, a very political band, and at the end of a long segment of talking with no sound, the guy turned around and had a picture of George Bush on his back for a split second.
  Alleged: Tom Petty (and everyone else!) @ Bonnaroo 2006 (FunknJam Productions messageboard)
  A big WTF? to the people in charge of streaming this webcast!! At first I thought that maybe it was a glitch in the streaming or my computer behaving funny. But every so often, the audio would cut out. And it always cut out while there seemed to be some interesting lyrics going on. I didn’t fully realize that the webcast was being CENSORED FOR CONTENT until Tom Petty sang for the third time, and had censored for the third time, “Let’s get to the point, Let’s (dead air) and turn the radio on….” Like that song hasn’t been played on the radio to death?!??! I can’t help but think this all had something to do with…. “Hey Wakarusa Policeman…”
  Alleged: Buddy Guy @ Bonnaroo 2006 (webcast setlist)
  Talks about Hip Hop/sings about a Cow/Bull/Mule ( censored )
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