We learned from The Wall Street Journal yesterday that "Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski gets a little peeved when people suggests that he wants to regulate the Internet." He told a group of Journal reporters and editors today that: "I don't see any circumstances where we'd take steps to regulate the Internet itself," and "I've been clear repeatedly that we're not going to regulate the Internet."

We're thankful to hear Chairman Julius Genachowski to make that promise. We'll certainly hold him to it. But you will pardon us if we remain skeptical (and, in advance, if you hear a constant stream of "I told you so" from us in the months and years to come). If the Chairman is "peeved" at the suggestion that the FCC might be angling to extend its reach to include the Internet and new media platforms and content, perhaps he should start taking a closer look at what his own agency is doing—and think about the precedents he's setting for future Chairmen who might not share his professed commitment not to regulate the 'net. Allow us to cite just a few examples:

Net Neutrality Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

We're certainly aware of the argument that the FCC's proposed net neutrality regime is not tantamount to Internet regulation—but we just don't buy it. Not for one minute.

First, Chairman Genachowski seems to believe that "the Internet" is entirely distinct from the physical infrastructure that brings "cyberspace" to our homes, offices and mobile devices. The WSJ notes, "when pressed, [Genachowski] admitted he was referring to regulating Internet content rather than regulating Internet lines." OK, so let's just make sure we have this straight: The FCC is going to enshrine in law the principle that "gatekeepers" that control the "bottleneck" of broadband service can only be checked by having the government enforce "neutrality" principles in the same basic model of "common carrier" regulation that once applied to canals, railroads, the telegraph and telephone. But when it comes to accusations of "gatekeeper" power at the content/services/applications "layers" of the Internet, the FCC is just going to step back and let markets sort things out? Sorry, we're just not buying it.

Chairman Genachowski may sincerely believe that a clear, bright line can be drawn between the "infrastructure layer" (which he's certainly going to regulate) and what he likes to think of as "the Internet" (which he promises not to regulate). But as we warned last October, the day after the FCC launched this NPRM:

The promise made yesterday by the FCC—to only apply neutrality principles to the infrastructure layer of the Net—is hollow and will ultimately prove unenforceable. The reality is that regulation always spreads. The march of regulation can sometimes be glacial, but it is, sadly, almost inevitable: Regulatory regimes grow but almost never contract… The basic premise of neutrality regulation is already being proposed for other layers of the Internet.... whatever the FCC might say today, any large online intermediary with a popular platform potentially faces the threat of "network neutrality" mandates—because every platform is essentially a "network," too. We're not just talking about "search neutrality" (Google as well as Microsoft) but also about "device neutrality" (mobile handsets), "app neutrality" (Apple's iTunes store, Facebook's developers and Google's Android mobile OS) and so on for social networking, email, instant messaging, online advertising, etc.

We explained how the intellectual foundations for this regulatory creep have already been laid by groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge and law professors like Columbia's Tim Wu (father of "Net Neutrality"), Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain (father of "API/device Neutrality"), and Seton Hall's Frank Pasquale (father of "Search Neutrality"). Joining this intellectual vanguard of Internet regulation is George Washington law school professor Dawn Nunziato, whose new book, Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age, is a veritable manifesto for expansive neutrality regulation (especially of Google)—and how the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law...") should be twisted not just to allow such regulation of speech platforms, but to require it! Even Wu, whose work blazed a trail for these others, is pretty clear about the breadth of his original vision for "neutrality" regulation, as his popular Net Neutrality FAQ makes clear:

The promotion of network neutrality is no different than the challenge of promoting fair evolutionary competition in any privately owned environment, whether a telephone network, operating system, or even a retail store. Government regulation in such contexts invariably tries to help ensure that the short-term interests of the owner do not prevent the best products or applications becoming available to end-users.

Zittrain, Pasquale, and Nunziato don't pull any punches either: They don't shy away from flirting with nebulous neutrality definitions and wide-ranging government powers to regulate. So we don't have to imagine what the "slippery slope" might look like: There are plenty of very smart and highly influential legal academics out there hard at work sketching out precisely where the path Chairman Genachowski has started us down will ultimately lead.

It's no less clear why we'll wind up marching down that path, no matter what the current FCC leadership intends.

1. The current net neutrality rulemaking sets a profoundly dangerous legal precedent of essentially unlimited claims of "ancillary jurisdiction": As our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who have a soft spot for net neutrality in theory) put it, "If 'ancillary jurisdiction' is enough for net neutrality regulations (something we might like) today, it could just as easily be invoked tomorrow for any other Internet regulation that the FCC dreams up (including things we won't like)." Our PFF colleague Barbara Esbin carefully dissected this issue for the Commission in her recent filing in this proceeding.
2. As explained above, the general regulatory principle of controlling "gatekeepers" doesn't end with infrastructure.
3. As EFF notes, "Experience shows that the FCC is particularly vulnerable to regulatory capture."
4. Now that FCC has opened the door to micro-managing online business practices in the name of "neutrality," the companies that have made America the leader in the Digital Revolution are already turning on each other in a dangerous game of brinksmanship, escalating demands for regulation and playing right into the hands of those who want to bring the entire high-tech sector under the thumb of government—under an Orwellian conception of "Internet Freedom" that makes corporations the real "Big Brother," and government, our savior.

This strategy of political escalation will thus quickly steamroll over whatever promises made today to narrowly cabin the principle of neutrality regulation—and end in "Mutually Assured Destruction." That's why we referred to the day the FCC started down this path back in September as "The Day Internet Freedom Died."

If that title sounds melodramatic, take a step back and consider that, back in 1996, Congress decided to enshrine in law the principle that the Internet is different from traditional media: Apart from an ill-considered effort to censor online indecency and obscenity (which was quickly struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional) and the enforcement of intellectual property and criminal laws, Congress decided to take a purely laissez-faire approach to the Internet. As Barbara reminded the Commission in her net neutrality filing, "Section 230(b)(2) flatly declares that it is the policy of the United States ― to preserve the vibrant competitive free market that presently exits for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation."

So Chairman Genachowski's decision to revert to the common carrier model of the railroad era marks a fundamental break with the approach Congress decided we would take to the Internet. The DC Circuit will likely soon rule that the FCC has vastly overstepped its authority in trying to set Internet policy without any clear grant of authority from Congress to do so.

Wireless Innovation & Investment Notice of Inquiry

In fact, the same kind of thinking is already being extended by this FCC in a number of other arenas using a flurry of innocuous-seeming "Notices of Inquiry." While these notices purport only to ask questions, they either:

1. Foreshadow where the Commission intends to go in proposing new regulations based on its nearly limitless conception of its own regulatory authority;
2. Are intended to pressure Congress to give the agency more statutory authority; or
3. Are intended to intimidate industry into "playing ball" so the FCC won't actually have to stick its neck out by trying to write rules to regulate Internet activities that are clearly beyond its existing authority and might well be unconstitutional even if Congress ever did expand that authority.

Exhibit A is the language in the Commission's August 2009 Wireless Innovation and Investment Notice of Inquiry, (paragraph 60, pg. 21) that suggests the FCC is angling to become the Federal Cloud Commission:

As other approaches, such as cloud computing, evolve, will established standards or de facto standards become more important to the applications development process? For example, can a dominant cloud computing position raise the same competitive issues that are now being discussed in the context of network neutrality? Will it be necessary to modify the existing balance between regulatory and market forces to promote further innovation in the development and deployment of new applications and services?

Good morning, Google! Hello, Facebook! Is anyone out there in the cloud listening to the rumbling thunder of federal regulation? What began as academic theory in a law school ivory tower is coming soon to a regulatory agency near you! But wait… there's more!

National Broadband Plan Public Notice #21 (Cloud Computing)

Last November, as part of the Commission's ongoing effort to develop a National Broadband Plan, the FCC released a request for information "on data portability and its relationship to broadband." (NBP Public Notice #21) "The Commission seeks tailored comment on broadband and portability of data and their relation to cloud computing, transparency, identity, and privacy," the notice says. Here was the second item on the list of things the Commission said it was investigating (p. 2):

When considering the portability of data, we also consider the processes through which data are moved. In this context, we seek comment on how to identify and understand cloud computing as a model for technology provisioning.... What types of cloud computing exist (e.g., public, hybrid, and internal) and what are the legal and regulatory implications of their use? ... To what extent are consumers protected by industry self-regulation (e.g., the Cloud Computing Manifesto), and to what extent might additional protections be needed? ... What specific privacy concerns are there with user data and cloud computing? What precautions should government agencies take to prevent disclosure of personal information when providing data? Is the use of cloud computing a net positive to the environment? Are there specific studies that quantify the environmental impact of cloud computing?

We suppose some might claim there's nothing wrong with the FCC looking into these issues, and that the agency's interest in cloud computing is entirely benign. (Never mind the fact that the Federal Trade Commission already enforces the privacy policies of cloud computing providers and is looking hard at online privacy.) Seeing all these open-ended questions about something so obviously beyond the scope of the FCC's authority just makes the potential for—and perhaps even inevitability of—regulatory creep hard to miss. Eventually, when a regulatory agency asks enough questions, especially the sort of questions highlighted above… well, to paraphrase Master Yoda:

Open-ended inquiries about new regulations are the path to the Dark side.

Inquiries lead to agency oversight.

Agency oversight leads to regulation.

Regulation leads to suffering for innovators and consumers alike.

Again, we're not just inventing bogeymen here. It's quite clear that regulatory advocates want to take neutrality regulation into "the Cloud." As Jason Lanier, author of the popular book You Are Not a Gadget summarizes one of his key themes:

While there is a lot of talk about networks and emergence from the top American technologists, in truth, most of them are hoping to thrive by controlling the network that everyone else is forced to pass through. Everyone wants to be a "Lord of a Computing Cloud."

In Lanier's dystopia of techno-feudalism, the Lords oppressing the poor digital "peasants" certainly aren't just those running broadband service providers. It's the Google, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world. It's similar to the "sharecropper" concern raised by Nick Carr in his book The Big Switch. Complaints like those will only grow in the years to come, and few will buy—or even pause to remember—the distinction Chairman Genachowski seems to stand on now between infrastructure and "the Internet."

National Broadband Plan Public Notice #29 (Privacy)

The "Recovery Act" passed in January 2009 tasked the FCC with formulating "a detailed strategy for achieving affordability of such service and maximum utilization of broadband infrastructure and service by the public." The FCC seized this as an opportunity to solicit suggestions as to how regulate the use and collection of data by the private sector on the grounds that concerns about privacy might somehow be slowing broadband adoption.

Chairman Genachowski's flurry of open-ended inquiries about new regulation are clearly intended to give a bully pulpit to regulatory advocates to demand that the FCC issue the very sort of Internet regulations the Chairman purports to abhor (or that Congress give the agency authority to do so). But most of these notices at least appear to be objective requests for comments written independently of the groups the Commission seems so eager to hear beg for Internet regulation. But in this case, the Commission dispensed with that tedious formality and just outsourced the writing of the inquiry itself to one of the outside groups clamoring the loudest for data regulation in the name of "privacy": our friends at the Center for Democracy & Technology, with whom PFF has worked closely on many free speech issues in the past.

CDT is on to something when they write that "Consumers will not embrace broadband if they have a sense that everything they do online will be watched by government officials." We'll join with them in the fight to protect consumers' privacy from the Real Big Brother—government!—but once again, as with net neutrality, advocates of regulation see government as the protector of our digital liberties (if only we can forever make sure noble civil-libertarians are in charge of the regulatory apparatus of the state!). So CDT has it exactly backwards when they say: "Consumer privacy concerns encompass not only what companies do with their data, but also the extent to which the government accesses it." And instead of just suggesting that the FCC's National Broadband Plan include a recommendation that Congress clean up the antiquated laws intended to limit government surveillance, CDT pushes for sweeping regulations that would affect the ability of most online services and sites to collect and use the data they need to improve their services, innovate, and maybe even try to make some money on advertising to support all the free content and services they give away.

Thus, instead of focusing on the clear harm from government, the FCC's outsourced inquiry goes after online operators as "privacy proxies" for concerns about government action. At least Congress actually asked for the FCC's recommendations in this case, unlike all the other inquiries the agency has launched sua sponte. But as Berin noted in his comments on this inquiry, the Recovery Act allowed the FCC to "recommend only those policies that it concludes will, on net, help achieve "affordability" and 'maximum utilization' of broadband." That means the Commission would actually have to consider the many trade-offs inherent in the private sector use of data before recommending regulation: If the Internet ecosystem is impoverished by government intervention, however well-intentioned it may be, users will have that much less reason to adopt and "utilize broadband." So the FCC would have a lot of cost-benefit analysis to do before it could actually make the kinds of regulatory recommendations CDT wants. And we suspect that, on the whole, that analysis wouldn't turn out the way CDT thinks it would.

Child Safe Viewing Act Notice of Inquiry

In a somewhat similar vein, Congress last year asked the agency to examine how well parental control technologies work to allow parents to filter objectionable content online. So while the FCC may have had, for once, the authority to ask broad questions, it's startling just how broad those questions were. The Commission obviously has no authority over video games or virtual worlds, online video distribution networks or video hosting sites, mobile web content, MP3 players or iPods, P2P networks, VCRs or DVD players, PVRs or TiVo, Internet filters, safe search tools, laptops, and so on. And yet, all these things (and much more) were mentioned in the Commission's Child Safe Viewing Act Notice of Inquiry.

The proceeding raises the prospect of what Adam has called "convergence era content regulation” since it opens the doors to FCC meddling on a number of new fronts in the name of "protecting children." Although the Commission's final report to Congress stopped short of calling for an substantive expansion of the agency's content regulatory regime, it teed up another proceeding, discussed next. (And if Congress hasn't moved more quickly to grant the FCC new power in this area, it's probably because they're busy trying to figure out how to get around a line of First Amendment cases that consistently require government regulation to yield to "less restrictive" alternatives like parental control tools and education.)

Empowering Parents & Protecting Children Notice of Inquiry

This wide-ranging inquiry reads like the ultimate "fishing expedition" by a regulatory agency—fishing for new jurisdictional authority to regulate, that is! The questions asked are too broad, far-flung and various to catalog here (we'll have a big filing coming in the matter soon), but the Commission asks about extending to Internet media the model of the 1990 Children's Television Act, which imposes "public interest" obligations on broadcasters and cable operators to offer "education" content while also strictly limiting how much advertising may be shown during children's TV. The Commission also alludes, ominously, to the V-chip model for requiring universal ratings for television and hints that it would really like for "current laws [to] be updated to reflect this convergence and to keep pace with changes in technology" (¶ 41).

The Commission mentions only in passing at the very end of the Inquiry that it "has varying degrees of statutory authority with respect to different media. We ask commenters, in proposing any action, to discuss the source and extent of the Commission's authority to take the action, or whether new legislation would be needed to authorize such action" (¶ 58). Translation: "Uh, yeah… so… we know we don't have a statutory leg to stand on here, but we think it'd be really cool if we did, so let's just all, you know, kinda brainstorm about what kind of regulation we could be imposing here and what kind of law we'd need get Congress to pass to make it all legal. Or if you have any creative ideas on how we could get away with just making up the jurisdiction thing on our own, that'd be even better!"

YouTube, you're first on the list of targets for the kind of online video regulation the FCC is hinting at here—and none too subtly. But why stop there? The FCC's laundry list of complaints aren't limited just to video, but could apply to essentially all online media. But this is all in the name of "protecting the children," and Chairman Genachowski doesn't want to regulate the Internet, so we really don't need to worry—right?

Future of Media Notice of Inquiry

Most recently, in late January, the Commission launched the ambitiously-named "Examination of the Future of Media and Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age." The FCC asks a number of good questions about how government could get out of the way of media struggling to reinvent themselves in the digital era by scrapping outdated regulations. The inquiry also tips its hat to the vital importance of advertising in supporting media. But it's otherwise pretty bad news as a harbinger of a "Chill Wind" for the future of a free press in this country, as Ken Ferree, PFF's former president and current board member noted.

In particular, the Commission comes right out with a "trial balloon" about imposing public interest obligations on online operators—the very thing it hinted at slightly more delicately in the "Empowering Parents" inquiry mentioned above:

Broadcasters have certain public interest obligations, including that they provide programming responsive to the needs and issues of their communities and comply with the Commission's children's programming requirements. Cable and satellite operators have their own responsibilities… Should such obligations be applied to a broader range of media or technology companies, or be limited in scope?

OK, so we're not going to "regulate" online content operators; we're just going to impose "public interest" obligations on them to provide certain kinds of content preferred by politicians. Right… and if Google News or YouTube don't do enough to "serve the public interest," what then? Will the Federal Search Commission take away Google's search license or cloud computing license?

Of course, we don't mean to suggest that even the "Federal Cloud Commission" would ever be so unsubtle as to create a formal licensing system when they can probably achieve the same ends with far less obvious regulation. But how is this all going to work, exactly? Again, this is exactly the kind of hopelessly vague regulatory morass Congress had in mind when it declared that the federal government would avoid "fettering" the "vibrant competitive free market ... for the Internet and other interactive computer services" with regulation.

The FCC goes on to revive the kinds of broad net neutrality ideas discussed above in asking:

How would policies related to "open Internet" or "universal broadband" or other FCC policies about communications infrastructure affect the likelihood that the Internet will meet the information needs of communities? Are there search engine practices that might positively or negatively affect web-based efforts to provide news or information?

In other words, "Tell us why and precisely how we should start regulating search engines in order to help 'save news.'" Google, here's looking at you, kid! You want to keep your search license, dontcha? Well, just do what the nice men from Washington want and there won't be any trouble.

Finally, the Commission opens the door to the noxious proposal for a "public option" for media, which Adam has lambasted. Here's what the Commission says:

In general, what categories of journalism are most in jeopardy in the digital era? What categories are likely to flourish? While much is still to be determined as media companies test various business models and payment approaches in the coming years, based on what is known now, are there news and information needs that commercial market mechanisms alone are unlikely to serve adequately?

Don't worry, it's not as if government will exercise control over the media companies it funds if the media-socialist fantasies of the neo-Marxist Robert McChesney and his ironically-named "Free Press" group actually come true. Nope, government's just here to help!

We'd all do well to remember that subsidies always come with strings attached—namely, regulation. That's the Golden Rule: "He who has the gold, makes the rules!"

Conclusion

Chairman Genachowski, with all due respect, if you don't like people suggesting that the FCC may be positioning itself to regulate the Internet and digital media platforms, then you might want to take a careful look at what your agency has been doing. You should think hard both about the precedents that will be set by "neutrality" regulation for online content and services, and also about the quasi-regulatory effect that your agency's flurry of open-ended inquiries will have on the operators you claim not to want to regulate.

What will future Chairmen do with these precedents? What will emerge from every "Pandora's Box" you've opened with each new sweeping inquiry? The answer, we fear, is an endless parade of new Internet regulations—and the death by a thousand cuts of real Internet freedom.

Cross-posted from the Technology Liberation Front

Written by Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow, The Progress & Freedom Foundation

The company also points out that part of the goal of the experiment will be to operate the network openly and give users choice of multiple service providers.

"I'm a big believer in Net Neutrality. I campaigned on this. I continue to be a strong supporter of it. My FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has indicated that he shares the view that we've got to keep the Internet open, that we don't want to create a bunch of gateways that prevent somebody who doesn't have a lot of money but has a good idea from being able to start their next YouTube or their next Google on the Internet."

However, since that time, the White House has lost some of its initial leadership. Rather than continuing to directly lead the changes as they did before and after the Inauguration, they handed that leadership back to partisan politicians. Congress and Senate are still heavily dominated by the lobbying of the vested interests and a lot of them are more interested in their own political power, which is severely damaging the national interest of America. There is no way that under those out-of-date political arrangements these politicians can lead the country in a democratic way.

The President obviously is very much aware of this, hence his State of the Union address. The current political environment is not particularly conducive to the introduction of the serious changes that the White House are proposing, the President will have to regain leadership and has to come back with innovative policies along the lines that myself and others have been discussing with his advisors in the White House.

These policies need to be developed on a step-by-step basis, rather than just concentrating on the support of Congress—perhaps more time needs to be spent to win the support of the people. The President had and largely still has the people behind him, and he should show leadership to these people, and together with them make these steps. It will be hard for the politicians to continuously keep blocking policies that are clearly supported by the people of America.

Rather than trying to reform Washington, perhaps the White House should, in parallel, work with the people and businesses to get new innovative policies implemented. Leadership is contagious, in Australia the Liberal Opposition behaves exactly like the Republicans in the USA—they vote everything down. However the Government is supported by everybody else, they have even been able to win the support of the incumbent telco, and that will ensure that the NBN will be built in this country, despite the politics. The USA cannot afford to not make changes similar to those that are taking place in other developed telecoms markets.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

Was this done as a PR move (nothing wrong with that, of course!), or was there really something substantive here policy-wise? I took a read, and here are the interesting nuggets IMHO.

First off, it sounds really good. Apparently the two companies are of like mind on lots of important issues, or "several overarching values" as the submission states. These include:

• Understanding that the Internet is unique and has thrived in an environment of minimal regulation
• A person should be able to connect to any other person he or she wants to, with no central authority imposing rules
• Public policy should provide appropriate incentives for commercial investment
• Users should have control in how they use the Internet, and the transparency to make informed decisions
• Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs) should be established to mediate disputes
• Communications laws and regulations should not apply to Internet applications, content or services.
• There should be some mechanism for federal authorities to address "bad actors" (italics mine) when competition and self-regulatory efforts are unsuccessful—but only on a case-by-case basis.
• Acknowledge that broadband network providers, in addition to offering traditional Internet services, should have the ability to offer users the choice of service options in addition to traditional Internet access services.
• The focus of any nondiscrimination rule should be to prevent harm to users or to competition
• Verizon and Google disagree whether mobile networks should be part of an Open Internet framework—oh well, can't agree on everything!

It would be hard to disagree with any of the above in principle. But from a policy standpoint, trying to discern what these two companies are trying to communicate, three of those "overarching values" seem most interesting to me—network management/new services, the TAGs, and the point about communications laws not applying to Internet applications or services.

The network management/new services point is critical to carriers, and Google I think is being realistic in agreeing. It's just feasible to say a carrier can't treat certain traffic differently, since some services demand network management to work properly. A VoIP call needs more consistent bandwidth than an email or http query, for example. Carriers would also have no incentive—beyond market competition, that is—to continue to upgrade their networks if they could not monetize that investment through new services.

TAGs are an interesting concept, and I hope they get implemented. I do think Google and Verizon are over-estimating how much agreement can be reached just by pulling together some technical experts. You can look to the wrangling within ICANN, or the disagreements between the IETF and the ITU and see the limits of this approach.

Finally, there is the innocuous line about communication laws not applying. Readers of CircleID know what a huge point this is. Currently phone services provided via circuit-switched networks are subject to all sorts of regulations built up over decades. One the other hand, phone service provided via digital networks—for example Vonage, or a cable company—is classified as an "information service," and not subject to all that regulation.

So, what Verizon and Google are saying is sure, we'll submit this to you FCC, but guess what? You don't have any authority in this area to regulate the Internet. Pretty cheeky of them, huh!? Based on an interview given by Chairman Genachowski (my post on that here), I don't think he agrees.

If you've reached the end of this post and are still interested, Drew Clark at Broadbandcensus.com recently launched a new publication tracking these issues in great detail. It's called BroadbandBreakfast.com, and here's their story on this submission.

This country truly is at a communications crossroad, moving into an all IP future. There is nothing "wrong" with our old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), which was once the envy of the world—and still delivers better phone service than many countries enjoy. But the future is in the advanced services carried over end-to-end IP networks, and the FCC needs to balance the needs of the providers and the needs of users. If every interested party ends up a little unhappy, then maybe that would indicate such a balance. The next chapter is the FCC's national broadband plan, due in March. This process will be fascinating to watch for years to come.

Written by Christopher Parente, High Tech Public Relations

It seems like there's a different headline story about Google every day lately, and there's a lot here that service providers should be paying attention to. The launch of Nexus One around CES earlier this month is especially important for all mobile operators as well as the handset vendors partnering with them. A few days later, we started hearing noise about Google Energy. While they have said little about this publicly, it has been a hot topic in utility circles, and I wrote about it last week wearing my Smart Grid hat on our portal.

Like the Internet, Google has become such a fluid company that it can find an entry point into practically any market, and maybe they're just trying to live up to the spirit of their name with all these seemingly unrelated ventures. I'm going to focus here on the China story, which has been a global topic this week for a variety of reasons, and I'll touch on the most carrier-centric ones here.

As we all know, Google is standing up to China, and threatening to pull out of that market on principle over the issue of Internet censorship. This is a very interesting showdown, and for once, it's not about money. Early on, Google—and others like Yahoo!—acquiesced to China's demands, allowing monitoring of Google activity in exchange for entry into this huge market. Well, Google has had enough, and we've got a digital Cold War brewing.

This brings me around to the title of this article—what business are you really in? I think it's a legitimate question for service providers to be asking these days. Am sure you know the classic example—McDonalds. When Ray Kroc asked this question to business students, they didn't hesitate to say it was the hamburger business. He quickly corrected them, explaining he certainly sells lots of those, but he's really in the real estate business.

Most people would say the U.S. Postal Service is in the business of delivering mail. Again, that is true, but I would argue they're really in the privacy business. It may seem quirky in this day and age, but there's still something sacrosanct about the mail. We open anything addressed to us in a heartbeat (well, the bills can wait), but you never open other's people's mail, right? You just don't do it on principle. If given a choice between keeping our mail totally private and getting it a few days slower, instead of faster service but possibly compromised for privacy, am sure we'd all prefer the former hands-down.

Well, there's a lot of that going on in China right now, and I think the stakes are pretty high. We all know the Beijing Olympics were a big mirage, and China may be more open than in the past, but it's still a highly controlled society. They would argue that their brand of state-run capitalism is more stable than our Wild West model, and there's some merit to this, but let's stay on message. I could go down this road a long way, but not here.

Openness is a bedrock principle of the Internet, and as desirable as this may sound, it does come with tradeoffs. We all know that the Web is used for evil as much as for good, and China has had its share of both. Their differences with Google are important, but the Internet's dark side has had other chapters coming from China, and I don't think we've seen the last of them. Do you remember Project GhostNet from last March? It was an incredible story, and lucky for me, it was exposed by a team of researchers here in Toronto. If you've forgotten or if this is news to you, I suggest you start with my blog post and connect the dots for yourself back to what's happening now with Google. Better yet, Google the term GhostNet—that will keep you busy for a while.

All of this is leading to my main point that privacy and the Internet are going in different directions. Some of this is a generational thing, as younger people are more willing to give up some privacy—or a lot of it—to stay connected with their world. Being connected today is more virtual than real, but that's reality.

I believe that service providers will increasingly need to manage privacy expectations for subscribers, and the Google/China issue is really drawing this into focus right now. The original Internet vision was global, with all of us interconnected under one cloud, so to speak. I suspect that China will not back down, and if Google walks, Baidu will totally own their domestic search market. Compared to what we're used to, China would then become a pretty closed market, and could well open the way for other like-minded countries such as Iran to follow this model. In that scenario, the Internet devolves into parallel universes, seriously diluting the intended concept. So much for the global village.

This sure sounds like the "islands of VoIP" scenario that exists in the enterprise space, and it's really not a good thing. The Internet is at its best when it's open, and for everyone to benefit, service providers have an important role to play in creating a balance between openness and meaningful privacy. As we're seeing in China, this is easier said than done, and in my mind, it's a wake-up call for the West, where freedom is of the utmost importance.

I'm going steer clear of the Net Neutrality debate, but I have no doubt these current events will lead many subscribers in the West to ask questions about how much privacy they really do have, and how much they can really trust their service provider. Data mining techniques have become very sophisticated, and if used in the wrong way, are really no different than the censorship policies we're hearing about in China. Many questions here, and to me, it's a pivotal opportunity for service provider to think a little harder about the business they really are in.

Written by Jon Arnold, Principal, J Arnold & Associates

Read full story: PC Magazine

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   by Sam Johnston - Mar 06, 2009
7. Can't Connect… Won't Connect
   by Bill Thompson - May 13, 2009
8. The Cybersecurity Act of 2009
   by Steven Bellovin - Apr 13, 2009
9. Google AdSense Asks Publishers to Change Their Websites' Privacy Policy
   by Dhaval Doshi - Mar 13, 2009
10. YouTube's Fine - Analysts Don't Understand Internet Peering
    by Brough Turner - Apr 16, 2009

Top 10 News in 2009:

1. Network Solutions Under Large Scale DDoS Attack, Millions of Websites Potentially Unreachable
   Jan 23, 2009
2. U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Physical Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyberattack
   May 13, 2009
3. Google Cloud Storage Coming Within Weeks
   May 20, 2009
4. Finland First Country to Make Broadband a Legal Right
   Oct 14, 2009
5. SPECIAL: Updates from the ICANN Meetings in Sydney
   Jun 26, 2009
6. Google Rolling Out Its Services Over IPv6
   Jan 08, 2009
7. ICANN's President and CEO Announces Resignation
   Mar 02, 2009
8. Iran's Internet Censorship Most Sophisticated in the World
   Jun 19, 2009
9. Comcast Unleashes Trial DNS Redirection in Select States
   Jul 09, 2009
10. Latest Cybersquatting Stats from WIPO
    Mar 16, 2009

Top 10 Industry News in 2009 by sponsored posts*:

1. Facebook Selects MarkMonitor Antifraud Solutions to Combat Malware
   by MarkMonitor - Apr 30, 2009
2. .ORG First Open Top-Level Domain to be Signed with DNSSEC
   by PIR - Jun 02, 2009
3. Perspectives from a Nonprofit Domain Name Registry on Navigating the Social Media Frontier
   by PIR - Apr 24, 2009
4. Expanding Internet Access Driving Software Piracy, Study Says
   by MarkMonitor - May 22, 2009
5. A Seemingly Overwhelming Number of Important Documents Released by ICANN
   by MarkMonitor - Jun 02, 2009
6. MarkMonitor AntiFraud Solutions Combine Proven Antiphishing and Expert Antimalware Capabalities
   by MarkMonitor - Mar 23, 2009
7. DNSstuff.com Offers Trusteer Rapport Product to Help Users Boost Their Defenses Against Online Fraud
   by DNSstuff - Mar 23, 2009
8. dotMobi Names AutoTrader.mobi as Millionth Site Tested by Acclaimed mobiReady Tool
   by dotMobi - May 20, 2009
9. IP Rights in Digital Environment Key Element of Proposed Treaty
   by MarkMonitor - Apr 15, 2009
10. COCC Partners with MarkMonitor for Anti-Phishing Services
    by MarkMonitor - Mar 18, 2009

* Featured news updates from CircleID's industry participants by more information here - see 'Dedicated Marketing Channel' section

Written by CircleID Reporter

Now we all know that UPS and FedEx have different grades of service—Overnight, Two Day, Three Day, etc. And faster deliver costs more.

Several years ago UPS and FedEx would frequently deliver a Two Day package the next day, i.e. they would effectively elevate the class of service. A lot of us took advantage of that by sending almost everything using the lesser grade (and price) and often winning a higher grade (and price) delivery.

I am sure that that that did not please the bean counters at the shipping companies.

Today, with better tracking systems UPS and FedEx almost never deliver a package in advance of the delivery time for the paid class of service. They will hold packages in their warehouses in order to make this so. Today, if you want a given class of service you can get it only by paying for it; the old gambling trick no longer works. I am sure that this has increased UPS' and FedEx' revenue.

The thing to note here is that UPS and FedEx can carry packages Overnight, but that they impose a delay, often an artificial delay, on packages that aren't paying the premium Overnight tariff.

So what has this got to do with Network Neutrality?

Consider an ISP that adopts the UPS/FedEx model. In particular let's say that this ISP decides to impose a delay of 100 milliseconds on all standard class packets and does so in a way that is completely neutral as to source, destination, or protocol. On a 10gigabit link that means holding about 125megabytes of traffic, in each direction, in a delay queue—that's a number readily within the range of today's technology.

Then that ISP could offer premium, i.e. more expensive, grades of service that bypass some or all of that 100 millisecond delay.

I have never heard anyone claim that either UPS or FedEx is not acting with neutrality. It would seem that an ISP that acts as I have described would also be able to claim that it is just as neutral as UPS and FedEx.

I did not pick 100 milliseconds out of the air—rather I picked it because it can have a pernicious effect on VoIP. The ITU publishes 150ms as the time limit beyond which the users of a VoIP call to go into "walkie-talkie" mode. 100ms, one way, does not reach that amount, but it is close enough that other network delays could easily push the connection over the edge; and round trip time will certainly exceed the threshold. In other words, a completely neutral application of 100ms to all packets, VoIP or not, will force VoIP users to upgrade to a premium service.

Other network activities would be impaired. Domain name transactions would slow down causing user perceptions of sloggish service.

Bulk data transfers, such as web downloads of images, would only be marginally effected once TCP adapts to the round trip time. But ISP's could "fix" that by adding some packet loss and some delay jitter to their "standard" quality.

The point of this exercise is to suggest that ISPs have a well stocked bag of tricks to induce users to pay more for what we used to get for free from "best effort" services on the internet.

Written by Karl Auerbach, Chief Technical Officer at InterWorking Labs

I pointed out that the internet is 'an excellent example of the power of mutualism, having been created and managed through the co-operative effort of tens of thousands of individuals and organisations' and that it 'provides an infrastructure on which mutual organisations can thrive, opening up new potential for fast, effective communication and co-ordination of action, collaborative and consensus- driven decision making and global action.'

Re-reading it now I wasn't too embarrassed by my ten-year old analysis. The recently-concluded Internet Governance Forum in Egypt reflects the net's continuing mutualist principles, while its organising power has been demonstrated many times in the last nine years. We have seen political sites like MoveOn, campaigning initiatives like Avaaz.org and of course the growth of Facebook as the primary way teenagers like my son manage their social life and arrange their many parties.

One of the main themes I explored was the nature of the public online space that emerges when millions of computers—each privately owned and managed—are connected together, the space that comes into existence within the connected computers of the world and which is not, therefore, directly owned by any one organisation, individual or company.

This public space, like public parks or common land, is precious and valuable, but it is constantly under attack from those who would regulate it, control it or seek to use it to promote their own commercial or political interests. In 'e-mutualism' I was most concerned about attempts by service providers to create their own private networks, noting that:

"if non-standard programs and services (as provided by AOL, for example) proliferate then the Internet will fall victim to the tragedy of the commons, as the public space (the standards-based network) is consumed by commercial interests whose success will diminish the connectivity which makes the Net valuable to us all".

The world has changed a lot since my pamphlet was published, and the danger of internet balkanisation or dominance by private networks has, I think, receded though the debate about net neutrality and whether internet service providers should be allowed to control certain types of traffic or offer higher levels of service to content owners that pay them is perhaps its modern equivalent. We may yet see an internet divided by network speeds rather than incompatible protocols.

The argument over the public space of the network has not gone away, however, although it now relates to a different level of the network. Instead of the internet itself as a collection of linked computers it concerns the social network and the various sites, tools and services that many of us now rely on.

We can see how much public space matters in the furore over what might seem at first to be a relatively small change to the way Twitter operates. The micro-blogging service may be a minority occupation and its attractions may be a mystery to the vast majority of internet users, but the hype does not diminish its importance as a bellwether for the future development of social media.

One of the behaviours that has emerged over Twitter's short life is the re-tweet, where a user passes on a tweet from another person so that it will be drawn to the attention of their followers. A convention has arisen that retweets are prefixed with 'RT', include the name of the original tweeter, may be lightly edited to fit Twitter's 140 character limit and can include editorial comment, usually in parentheses at the end.

So if @ruskin147 tweets that "it's been a great day in the office" I might pass this on as "RT @ruskin147 it's bn a gr8 day in the office (alright for some!)" and everyone will know what is going on.

Most Twitter applications now support re-tweeting and automatically add the prefix. It's a simple, easy convention that was developed by the Twitter-using public to serve our needs.

And now Twitter, the company which runs the service, has decided that retweeting should work differently. The details are less important than the fact that they have changed the way their software works and added new functionality to their website and interface so that Twitter applications can also change to support the new way of doing things.

Unlike some users I don't think the new way is broken, and I can see how it might make it easier for Twitter to handle the volume of traffic, provide tracking information to users and even learn more about which tweets are popular—perhaps even as a first step to offering advertising against the service.

But the real significance is that the company simply did what it wanted to a service that it controls and we, the users, had absolutely no say in the matter. This makes it starkly clear that Twitter, no matter what we might like to think in our more optimistic moments, is not a public space in any meaningful way.

It is the same with Facebook or MySpace. When we start using these new social tools we are stepping from the High Street, maintained as a public thoroughfare but offering access to private premises, into the Mall, where the rules are set by Grosvenor Estates or whoever else has acquired the land from the council. We urgently need to consider whether we need, want or can mantain true public spaces online, and who might act as trusted custodians of them.

Written by Bill Thompson, Journalist, Commentator and Technology Critic

Of course, that's if you read and understand the proposed rulemaking document. Tier1 encourages everyone to do so—it's not that long, nor is it complex. One of the most contentious parts of the proposed rulemaking is section 106, reprinted below. The idea is that carriers won't be allowed to prioritize traffic for money. That means that Google can't pay Verizon to give preference to Google's traffic. This only really comes into play on the last mile, which is sometimes congested—lower priority bits might be dropped, while higher priority might be assured delivery. Some have opined that this is a good idea, because content like video would be assured of delivery, but the content providers have, not surprisingly, come out against this, as have consumer groups. Tier1 is unsure when big profitable content providers like Google became the good guys and big profitable carriers became the bad guys, but that appears to be the situation, at least in terms of public perception.

In the midst of this great debate comes a significant amount of disinformation, mostly from the pro-network neutrality (i.e., no prioritization) side. One often-quoted idea is that consumers will be charged for the prioritization. Of course, the carriers want the content providers to pay, so any upcharge to consumers would be indirect at best. A more serious, if much more technical, bit of disinformation has materialized in the past few days, originating from 'Internet Interconnection expert' Bill Norton. On his 'Dr. Peering' website, Norton has twisted section 106 of the proposed rule-making into a pretzel, claiming that it would ban the practice of 'paid peering,' or selling of a content provider or carrier's 'on-net' routes. In effect, this is when a broadband provider sells partial Internet transit, allowing access only to its subscribers, typically to a content provider. So, Comcast might sell paid peering to a CDN, which would enable the CDN to dump its outbound traffic to Comcast for a fraction of the price of transit—a win-win. Paid peering is considered a valuable arrow in the Internet interconnection quiver, along with settlement-free peering and regular paid Internet transit.

Paid peering traffic is no more prioritized than regular peering or transit traffic. There is no way that any reasonable person would feel that section 106 might apply. Now, however, Norton has raised the possibility of such, and seems intent on convincing the FCC that he's right. Recently, prominent (if technically challenged) blog GigaOm has published a piece by Richard Bennett, which agrees with Norton, using Norton as the only source. Numerous experienced and prominent Internet architects have spoken out about this matter but this has seemingly fallen on deaf ears—neither Bennett nor Norton seem willing to retract their comments.

This has also turned into a smear on Google, which Norton has claimed wants to ban paid peering. This is in spite of protestations to the contrary by Google staff and the total lack of any sort of advantage accruing to Google. Tier1 does not agree wholeheartedly with Google's network-neutrality stance, but lying about its stated position is no way to advance the debate in a positive way.

Why do you care? Paid peering is a valuable interconnection tactic and is widely utilized by hosting providers and content delivery networks. Those paid peering interconnections (the fibers) are purchased from carrier-neutral colocation facilities. The practice improves Internet performance for content from providers that is delivered to many millions of users. It also saves a significant amount of money. The arguments against? None, as far as Tier1 can tell—Norton and Bennett seemed to need something to write about. But the threat extends past a few self-promoting bloggers—Norton was recently invited to share his insights with the FCC.

One criticism of these network-neutrality regulations is that they can be distorted or misinterpreted. That is certainly a danger and its one that is on display here—for no reason other than sheer self-promotion. Tier1 urges that everyone involved listen to the real experts and leave paid peering alone—stop dragging it into the network-neutrality debate, or else we may all lose a valuable tool while gaining nothing.

Tier1 also urges caution when dealing with self-appointed experts—most of the true experts are senior technical staff at major service providers, CDNs or content providers, and are not in a position to comment in the way that Bennett or Norton are. Tier1 can only point to the legion of actual Internet architecture experts who have uniformly condemned Bennett and Norton's position. A short list of those who commented—in opposition—to the GigaOm blog entry include widely regarded Internet architects Patrick Gilmore, Vijay Gill, Dave Temkin, Steve Meuse, Joe Provo, Adam Rothschild, and Richard Steenbergen.

________
Section 106 of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

106. We understand the term "nondiscriminatory" to mean that a broadband Internet access service provider may not charge a content, application, or service provider for enhanced or prioritized access to the subscribers of the broadband Internet access service provider, as illustrated in the diagram below. We propose that this rule would not prevent a broadband Internet access service provider from charging subscribers different prices for different services. We seek comment on each of these proposals. We also seek comment on whether the specific language of this draft rule best serves the public interest.

Written by Daniel Golding, VP and Research Director at Tier 1 Research

Recall that last month Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society delivered its draft broadband study (the draft, related post), commissioned by the FCC to assist in the development of a National Broadband Plan through an expert review of literature.

Many of the comments were not supportive of the Harvard Berkman study.

In an earlier blog posting, we had observed that there appeared to be statistical problems in the Berkman study that would not hold up to peer review. Our comments may have understated the extent of the problems.

The Phoenix Centre said that the Berkman study was "so flawed that it cannot be relied upon to formulate public policy":

the Berkman Study first improperly estimates its econometric model and then incorrectly interprets the results from it. The error in the interpretation is significant. While the [Berkman] Study's authors verbally conclude that open access policies stimulate increased consumption of broadband, the econometric model they rely upon shows the opposite—open access reduces the consumption of broadband.

The Phoenix Centre also said

[Under the Berkman Study's analysis] the supply curve is downward sloping! This result implies that as broadband prices rise, network operators supply less broadband. Intuitively, this result makes little sense, violates the law of supply, and muddles interpretation.

Oops.

NTT weighed in to correct errors in Berkman's analysis of the Japanese market—errors that it said could have been avoided had the authors of the Berkman study interviewed NTT.

First, facilities based competition, not unbundling, has been the key to broadband growth in Japan.

... Second, the report mistates the importance of 'government-subsidized loans' to the success of broadband deployment in Japan.

... Third, the Berkman Center's draft study is internally contradictory.

... In sum, the review of broadband facilities and regulation in Japan contained in the Berkman Center draft study is both factually incorrect and internally inconsistent.

Verizon's comments said the Berkman study largely ignored the body of literature that demonstrate that unbundling and mandated open access policies have not only failed to improve broadband performance, but frequently have had the opposite effect.

In particular, study after study has shown that government policies such as subsidizing the development of broadband infrastructure and a range of demand-side factors from population density to computer ownership—not the preference for unbundling over intermodal facilities-based competition—are the primary factors explaining the successes of some other countries.

Many of the comments observed that the Berkman study ignored its mandate: to conduct an independent expert review of existing literature and studies about broadband deployment and usage throughout the world.

The New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation, based at Victoria University of Wellington, observed that the Berkman report does not contain an explicit review of the large body of literature on policy and broadband market performance from academic and peer-reviewed sources - fewer than 10 of the more than 400 referenced citations were derived from papers in this body of literature.

The New Zealand submission raised "questions about the standards of competence and integrity applied to this aspect of the Berkman analysis, and by extension to the entire project."

Johannes Bauer, of Michigan State University's Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media was less harsh, but said:

The Commission should take the evidence provided in the study into consideration but be keenly aware of the limitations of the study. Furthermore, caution is appropriate when transferring lessons from abroad to the US. Not only is the market environment different, the institutional, legal, and regulatory environments also differ from those of other countries. Not all observations from abroad can be transferred to national contexts.

NCTA was quoted saying "The Berkman Report, in short, is an advocacy piece, not the work of dispassionate scholarship that the Commission requested." The Broadcasting & Cable news story said that would make it antithetical to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's stated aim of having data, not ideology, drive conclusions.

(This post originally appeared on our blog.)

Written by Mark Goldberg, Telecommunications Consultant

Apps are critical to the success of the iPhone, which "is transforming AT&T's entire network and business," again according to a colleague. He knows that the (mostly) open platform of the iPhone is necessary to give iPhone apps access, which in turn is crucial to the success of AT&T wireless. Donovan suggests that a similar openess will make a dramatic difference across the business. If they discriminate in favor of their own video, games, or whatever comes next, developers will be hard to attract.

John is still new to AT&T, and clearly is "thinking different." His handlers apparently forgot to tell him what not to say, so he explained AT&T's strategy straight, not filtered through his (extremely effective) D.C. lobbyists. Presumably, an angry phone call from D.C. now has told him to shut up.

Ed Gubbins at Telephony has the quote as "We use the principle of 'us on us,'" [Donovan] said, referring to AT&T services on AT&T's network. "If we take an external developer and ourselves, we should not be advantaged in how long it takes or how much expertise is required. It needs to be that simple, because that would put the foundation in place for how to horizontalize all your platforms in a way. Far enough is when you're on equal footing with anyone that externally would be looking to bind your network. Whether you're reaching for physical assets, logical assets or into the IT systems, I don't think it needs to be that complicated. You just have to say, 'Is us on us the same as them on us?' ... We have to prepare our networks for a world where the user experience is going to be [controlled by] any number of different companies unique to the individual user."

Richard Epstein can make a sensible argument against Net Neutrality (government will screw things up,) but the AT&T advocates in D.C. apparently can't. At least one said equal treatment would be impossible, foolishly contradicting his CTO, SVP, and CEO Ed Whitacre testifying in the Senate. Kim Hart reported DC opinions that U-Verse spending would be decimated if the rules went through, a silly notion. Cable is clobbering them where they don't have U-Verse and they can't afford to cut it back.

Written by Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime

This confusion arises from the success of the Internet. People see what works and assume that the purpose of the Internet is to support those applications. The fact that applications requiring low latency (delays) and low jitter (variability) work in some cases means that we must now promise to make sure they work everywhere. The very innovation that made the application work so well at such a low cost is now seen as a threat to the new status quo.

We "prove" this by example—but that's just the opposite of science. Science is about testing ideas rather than looking for confirmation of our presumptions. We then add more confusion by building in the mechanisms we presume are necessary thus which, of course, "proves" that they are the reason the applications work.

In fact the applications started to "just work" because the mechanisms are not built in—it's this seeming paradox that keeps us arguing in circles. As I explain here, VoIP did not work in the 1980's. Or, to be more precise, it might've indeed worked over local networks but you couldn't presume that it would work between LANs, especially when dialup connections were involved. Instead we used the Internet for more tolerant applications such as email and file transfers.

If we had to make voice work we could've built it into the network by being dependent upon the network giving us a dedicated path. This is the basic design choice made in SS7. Both the Internet and SS7 were done by Computer Science people but with different assumptions. SS7 achieved its goal and supporting high quality (56KB in the US) voice but at the price of being dependent upon high priced gear (as per 1970's prices).

By eschewing dependence on such gear the Internet (as a thing) couldn't make such promises. Instead we had to find out what worked and go with it. Email worked because it was very tolerant and typical messages were a few hundred characters with people flagging messages over a thousand words or so as large.

Experience suggested that applications such as voice and video couldn't work without special help because they were too sensitive to latency and jitter.

Then the Web happened. The web itself was initially about text so the latency and jitter weren't issues but it did generate a lot of traffic. And people predicted the Internet would collapse. Instead the opposite happened—demand created supply. One reason is that we're able to take advantage of any available bits with congestion being an annoying but not fatal. For example lost packet used to close a click but we've learned how to smooth over such problems.

It turned out that the capacity increased quickly where there were no disincentives. The increase came in many forms which can be loosely called Moore's law effects. But as I wrote here, the physics aspect of Moore's law is secondary to my marketplace formulation. If you decouple systems and embrace any opportunity you get hypergrowth. It didn't matter if you made bits run fast or you had more paths the net effect was more. (no puns intended but you can find them if you wish).

Thus fiber in the ground was able to carry more bits thanks to improved gear at the end points. Yet DSL didn't improve much beyond the initial 1980's implementation of ADSL because the carriers had no incentive beyond the original purpose of Interactive TV and improvements threatened their ability to charge high prices for T1 lines and for bits themselves. The same thing happened with fiber when the improvements led to a glut in capacity about 2000 and the carriers reacted by purposefully limiting capacity and then pretending the limits were inherent.

Meeting the demand for "web bits" had a side-effect of giving us copious capacity and the low latency, low jitter application started to "just work". But we mustn't forget that this is a process of discovery not one of promise. We might argue against the asymmetric "broadband" connections but we also discovered that they are indeed useful for video, especially since that was the original purpose of the underlying architecture.

To make this even more confusing is that once VoIP started working over high performance links clever folks started making it work seeming unsuitable paths and then voice-grams started to blur the distinctions between conversations and messaging. On the surface it all looks like telephony but it's not—and trying to preserve telephony becomes counter-productive.

The problem today is that observers who see these applications "just work" confuse discovery with purpose and want to bake in the applications in the same sense that some people supposedly wanted to close the patent office in the 1800's because everything had already been discovered. (A useful story even if not true).

I do think that we need new protocols less dependent upon network managers tilting the playing field and protocols which limit the ability of "bad players" to prevent others from discovering new possibilities. This is one reason I'm wary of "proper network management" since "proper" can reflect a presumption of purpose.

The fears of network collapse have a basis in reality just as the warnings that modems would destroy the phone network were real modulo their assumed architectural limits. But the solution was not in better network management and was instead in increasing the capacity so such problems became moot.

As with my comments on DSL the issue of incentives and funding are fundamental. Today's network in which network operators are threatened by abundance is the new "modem crisis" with concerns about neutrality being a countervailing force.

The real danger in the purpose-driven network is that we focus on how to manage scarcity by favoring applications on the presumption that the "network" is making promises rather than providing opportunity. We should be addressing the root (and route?) causes of the problem—the very idea that carriers have to monetize the traffic and thus have every incentive to limit capacity and make promises they that they can charge for. Indeed carriers proving bandwidth and video are making promises rather than just providing opportunity.

Alas the discussion of "neutrality" gets lost in this controversy over purpose. I'd like a simple formulation in which providers have no stake in making promises but the discussion may be too polluted by the presumption of purpose.

These considerations are very much on my mind as I write about Ambient Connectivity. It's about creating opportunity and decoupling the applications from providers who need to monetize each path.

Understanding AC requires a nuanced understanding of the Internet's dynamic and the success of the experiment in decoupling the applications from the accidental properties of the transport and its "owners".

Written by Bob Frankston, Independent Internet Professional