But I must agree with Richard. Reluctantly.

One thing that’s going to help far more here is an open mind that sees both sides of some of these debates - filtering, net neutrality etc.

The article you quoted (which still has not been substantiated in the real news, as far as I can tell), says “She will likely hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy, they said”. Some people think that putting someone who is not a policy expert in a policy role might be less than optimal. Susan is a policy and law person who absorbs tech like a sponge. Personally, I’m thrilled that the leader of a major country will have a high-level policy advisor who deeply understands technical details of the Internet.

Wow, where to start.  I’ve tried to stay out of this argument and frankly anything that Joe xx is involved in but no longer can.  This is getting ridiculous.

First of all, Joe “xx”, you claim that everyone is attacking and ridiculing you, yet I’ve kept up on your comments since you’ve joined and it appears to me that it really is you that provide the bulk of the sarcastic, obnoxious, childish comments.  You can’t fault others for eventually losing their patience and retaliating.  In this post you are the first comment and immediately call out Richard as an “overstuffed pompous ass” and make many other obnoxious comments.  That is not necessary.  Perhaps you should read CircleID’s Code of Conduct.

A few things…

1. First, stop being anonymous and just post your name.  It is cowardly to hide behind an anonymous “Joe xx” moniker and post obnoxious comments.  CircleID is a respectable blog composed of a wide variety of people from different parts of the industry – engineers, business people, lawyers and law professors, academics, etc. - that are trying to collaborate and share opinions.  We won’t agree on everything, that’s the point, and the debates are good so long as they remain professional.  CircleID is not intended to be like the many other blogs where people log on anonymously to badger other people and cause trouble.  If that’s what you want to do, please go elsewhere.  In the meantime, be a man (or woman, if that is the case but who knows?), and show your name please.  You can make your rebuttals and points sternly if you want, but be professional.

2. Along the same lines, please provide some sort of bio of yourself in the “About” section.  This goes along with being anonymous.  By providing details on your background it gives people an idea of where your opinion is coming from, what experience you may have (or not) and what affiliations you may have the shape your opinion.  As I said, there are many other anonymous blogs out there if you like, and they are a waste of time.  In the Comcast / network neutrality debate, they bordered on lunacy, and many anonymous comments sounded (from the spelling, grammar, writing style, maturity and general tone) like they were from some inexperienced immature 15 year old HS student who was upset that Comcast was preventing him from stealing music, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly who it was.  CircleID is no place for that.

3. Contribute something to the CircleID blog community besides just comments.  You been a member for less than 3 months yet you already have about 50 comments and a whopping ZERO posts of original thoughts and material.  As I have said before, there’s a reason there are more critics in this world than artists – it’s easy to sit back and criticize someone else’s original work than to create something yourself and have the guts to put it out there for others to critique.  Critics are a dime a dozen and are often misinformed.  Clearly you have plenty of time on your hands to read and comment on other posts.  Many of your comments contain quite a bit of background material, as if you had to do some research or at least some thinking about the topic.  Why don’t you package it all into a consolidated original post and allow others to comment?  Seriously, contribute something, anything.

Again, CircleID is a respectable blog and behavior like yours just drags it down. 

Please don’t.

Now, as far as Crawford.  I don’t have an opinion on whether that position should be filled by someone with more of a legal / policy background or one with more of a business or technical background.  There are good points here on either side.  But I mostly agree with Richard with respect to Crawford’s technical abilities.  I have followed Crawford’s posts and it is crystal clear to me beyond any reasonable doubt that she doesn’t know much about network technology, the practical realities of the Internet, or even the business and financial parameters that govern service providers’ business models.  She may be a brilliant lawyer and law professor – I don’t know, I’m not in a position to judge and wouldn’t have the knowledge to do so if I was.  But I do have the technical and business background in this industry to know that she doesn’t have it.  Her posts are evidence of it.  One of her posts was so incredibly bad that not only will I no longer bother commenting on her posts, I won’t even bother reading them anymore.  It began using some analogy about walking down the sidewalk with a friend and the sidewalk listening into the conversation or something.  Suresh – I think I remember you calling her out (rightfully so) on it being a really bad post not fit for CircleID.

As everyone knows, she has been active in promoting Network Neutrality, which is a noble cause but one that is often more an unachievable ideal in light of today’s practical limitations.  As Richard said, her views on network neutrality and how the Internet can and should be operated are incredibly naïve, idealistic and misinformed.  They may be nice thoughts in a perfect world but they don’t represent reality, and as Richard said she is not technical enough to know anything about the plethora of traffic shaping technologies out there much less how they could or should be applied.

Heck, Brett Watson, even you eventually conceded that some forms of traffic shaping were appropriate and justified on the Internet, though you seemed to prefer an application- agnostic total rate cap / traffic limit, or maybe a DiffServ model rather than the (inelegant) Sandvine / P-Cube model.  Crawford seems to say that you can’t do ANYTHING to a packet other than forward it.

Crawford seems to think the Internet should be, as Richard put it, a big fat dumb pipe.  I wonder if she realizes how much manipulation of her traffic actually goes on, that the network often “tells” her computer, in one way or another, to throttle back and reduce transmission speed, that the network will throw her traffic out periodically whether discriminating by application or not, that her traffic may be redirected (e.g., to a cache) or translated in some way, or if probably 9 out of 10 times she uses the Web her PC’s IP address is changed and probably to one that is shared by others (in which case her port numbers are changed as well.)  But I wonder if she knows what a port is?

The NN debate is complicated.  The best I can do to simplify it is to reduce it to 3 areas: legal/policy, technical and business.  There are probably other valid areas that can stand on their own as well, but that’s the best I can do to simplify it.  I think you need to bring experience in at least 2 of the 3 to the table to be able to present a valid argument.  Crawford brings only the legal side, which isn’t enough.  Congrats to her, that’s a great appointment for her and something to be proud of as none of us here qualified (at least no on the legal/policy side), but I just hope she does a bit of reading, learning, consultation (with technical and business folks), keeps an open mind, and does the right thing for everyone.

Firstly, Susan Crawford is not qualified for this post. She is not a technologist and has no technical training; she is, rather, a lawyer and lobbyist. Many of the policy recommendations she has published have reflected a complete lack of understanding of technology (and, in fact, an unwillingness to accept its realities) and would be harmful to the country if they were enacted. As a technologist myself (I created the first wireless broadband Internet service provider), I could make far better recommendations for this post, such as Professor David Farber of CMU (if one wanted someone who was primarily a technologist but also had a policy background) or the University of Pennsylvania’s Professor Christopher Yoo (if one wanted someone who is primarily a legal scholar but also understands technology and economics). Both have a far deeper and more well rounded understanding of both technology and policy than Crawford.

Secondly, Susan is part of (and sits on the “advisory board” of) a lobbying organization known as Public Knowledge, which has been lobbying Congress and the Administration on many issues. Most recently, Public Knowledge has been urging government officials to impose extremely stringent regulation upon the Internet—regulation which could destroy competition and innovation, dry up investment capital, and prevent deployment to unserved areas. Susan herself has recently appeared before Congress promoting her organization’s views. Since it is this Administration’s policy not to hire lobbyists to work in areas where they have lobbied—a policy of which I, as a citizen, very much approve—this likewise disqualifies her for this appointment.

Finally, and most disturbingly, Ms. Crawford has made false statements to Congress in an effort to promote her lobbying agendas. In a speech to the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee about one year ago, Susan stated that there is no competition in the realm of Internet services. Ironically, I—a competitive Internet service provider—was in the hearing room at the time! But despite the fact that I approached Susan during the break and pointed out that I and my approximately 4,000 fellow independent Internet service providers were indeed creating a great deal of competition in the marketplace, Ms. Crawford continued to state otherwise to Congress. Needless to say, the administration should not be comfortable appointing a lobbyist who made false statements to Congress, in an attempt to mislead it into crafting bad policy, as an advisor.

—Brett Glass