CircleID

Finally, some actual thought about the matter!

The author is essentially correct.  People have been living in HappyFunNetLand—things have been working well enough, or giving the illusion of that, that people actually believed that net neutrality existed, or didn't pay attention to the issues of security, etc.  The strains are starting to show and suddenly people realize that they might have to leave HappyFunNetLand and deal with the realities. 

I think a problem is that this is not exactly a technology issue.  It's a mix of resource management (bandwidth is limited, if it wasn't, we wouldn't have the over-selling issue and the Tier 1 peering issues), and people management (people abusing the network intentionally or unintentionally.) The tech-utopia proponents of HappyFunNetLand (i.e. Net Neutrality) are going to tend to propose more technology as the solution (more access points, bigger pipes, spam filters, etc. etc.) This will just make the problem worse because more resources simultaneously equals greater (potential for) abuse. 

(i.e. The equivalent of solving the problem of road rage and drunken driving by increasing the size and speed of the cars on the road and the number of roads/intersections, under the assumption that if more people can get where they want to go faster, there will be less trouble, but no one wants to talk about speed limits, seat belts, or even having different lanes for different types of traffic.  It's not a problem with the cars, it's a problem with the drivers getting along with one another.  Improving the cars only goes so far.)

However, I am pretty sure that the tech-utopia folks will continue to propose technology-based solutions, the business folks will continue to propose market/pricing/business solutions, and the legistlative folks will continue to propose laws and regulations to solve the problem.  I am also pretty sure that all of these will fail to, in practice, solve anything.  They may, however, at least cause some movement towards an eventual solution of some sort.

The future of the Internet will indeed be very interesting.

Net Neutrality isn’t evil, it’s silly to the point of ridiculous. It won’t really mean much in the long run though. In the short-term it is just capitalistic America at it again.

It definitely is silly, and it is 100% capitalism.  At the end of the day it's all about the bells trying to change the rules of the game so that more money lands in their pockets.  They are playing all the little tricks as well, trying to build a case for why they think they deserve more money. 

I debunked one such case in my own blog.

I should probably note that what I attack is the legislation by the telco's rather than Net Neutrality itself as a concept, which I am in favor of.

Thanks for your article. I find it synchronous with my own hesitations on commenting on this topic.

It seems to me that the whole 'Network Neutrality' fiasco is due to the business and political worlds catching up to the fact (in an easily digested meme) that relatively recent technologies can start to manage high network traffic in a very very granular way.

The SBC CEO's comment about questioning whether core network providers should charge network content providers (google et al) 'silk road' tarrifs caught the imagination and criticism of many idealists, and as a consequence brought the concept of neutrality into the public mind.

Concepts such as 'network neutrality' seem in direct conflict to the general overreaching environment of network provisioning.

It's my opinion and idealism that if policy makers really want to make a difference, then perhaps other issues are of more burning importance.

For socially relevant policy decisions, surely asymetric bandwidth provisioning, NATed services (making service provisioning so much harder than consumption), and volume charging models are issues that should affect the technological development of the Internet environment (not the Internet product).

National policy makers of many countries often wish to see their country wired up to the Internet for demographic penetration numbers to increase, rather than see their population be intrinsically and affordably involved in its development.

'Network Neutrality' is a sham that will soon fade(no service provider wants the support expense of explaining to customers that they can only use brand X of VOIP, brand Y of search engines, etc), and the (idealistic) activists that support it should concentrate on other policy issues that will really make a difference to the Internet and the people utilising it.

For nearly two years I oppose an IETF RFC (3066 Bis) which permits to organize language / racial / religious filtering in standardizing content language tags and develop "retro-meta-spam" (you receive a mail taged for a language or a theme: in responding the mail you tell that you know the language or are interested in the theme - a dynamic cookie).

This means that it is possible to identify querries, traffic, users in "en-latn-US" as more financially rewarding than in "iw-hebr-il", and to give them priorities. Let consider a major search service with twice less information in a language than in an other one. In processing the querries twice slower, it will retain the attention of the user on its advertizing the same time. etc.

Net neutrality is not only to be neutral to ports, but to people, languages and cultures. A topic some American stakeholders seem not to see the need for - or to well understand the costs and constraints - or is it that Net Neutrality can also be understood as equal opportunity for all? Why would a dominant group of interests want to lose their position?

In trying to wade through the argument I have found it usefull to distinguish several types of Internet providers: client, server and transit. Not all arguments are equally strong for every actor. See my blog