January, 2008

NBC11.com of San Jose posted an interesting reminder about Google's unique, highly suspect, and special deal with NASA, in which Google's founders get special parking privileges for their 767 "party plane" at NASA's Moffet Field, which is conveniently located just seven miles from Google's Silicon Valley headquarters.

Where is NASA's Inspector General on this?

Wikipedia's late entry into the search business is reportedly motivated by concern that Google's search is not "open" and that too few players will control access to the world's information as "gatekeepers." 

As the New York Times reports in "Wiki citizens taking on a new area: search," Jimmy Wales, founder of the collaborative Wikipedia, is concerned about how closed and concentrated the search business has become.

• Wales: “I think it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors,” he said. “We really have no ability to understand and influence that process.”

Comcast's announcement at CES to offer a quicker system for downloading movies and shows as reported by the New York Times is strong proof of why the FreePress petition asking the FCC to not allow Comcast to manage the p2p traffic on its network -- is unreasonable. 

Comcast is innovating to enable its network to offer what it calls "wideband," which will enable Comcast customers to download HD movies on demand -- that previously took up to six hours to download -- to less than 4 minutes.

• This innovative Comcast service will begin to be available to some Comcast customers in 2008 and is planned to offer ~6,000 video on demand titles to the broader Comcast base after that.

The point I am making here is that any network has relative bandwidth chokepoints where traffic must be managed in order to deliver expected quality of service to all customers.

CNET has a great article: New Hampshire voters: Net Neutrality? Huh? that exposes what we all know -- that net neutrality is a niche special interest issue that is not at all on the minds of average Americans.

It's not surprising because:

• The term "net neutrality" was only coined in 2002 by Columbia law Professor Tim Wu, and no one outside the FCC community heard about the issue until early 2006 when Google funded a big Moveon.org effort to make net neutrality an issue; and
• There is no real problem only largely manufactured incidents or admitted mistakes that the Moveon.org folks are trying to staple together into a broader pattern or problem.

Not only has every governmental body that has reviewed this issue rejected the call for net neutrality regulation/legisation, the American people aren't aware of the issue or the term. 

Kudos CNET for bringing another dose of the real world to this bogus issue.    

It is telling that the AP reporter who originally manufactured the story on Comcast's network managment practices, (through his own unscientific test) is the only mainstream reporter resuscitating this non-story.

Peter Svensson's AP story: "FCC to probe Comcast data discrimination" isn't news but an advocacy piece cloaked as a news story (see earlier post).

• At a minimum, the article should have been labeled a "news analysis" or an opinion piece.

It isn't "news" that the FCC investigates petitions.

Kudos to some straightforward reporting by PC World in: "Comcast Welcomes FCC Traffic Management Inquiry," which is in stark contrast to the "guilty-until-proven-innocent" headline in AP Peter Svensson's story "FCC to Probe Comcast's data discrimination."  

PC World reporters and editors have clearly not made up their mind in advance of the FCC's inquiry, unlike the AP reporter and editors which clearly have. 

It's becoming increasingly obvious that net neutrality proponents have not thought through the logical and practical implications of their call for mandating net neutrality. 

• Practically, net neutrality is about codifying Internet architecture design rules for the first time, which would have the real world effect of blocking, degrading and impairing innovation to allow the Internet to support "cloud computing" -- the future of computing according to Google, IBM and many others.

Why does net neutrality theory not work in practice?

First, net neutrality is really backward-looking, trying to take the Internet back to the dial-up/pre broadband days when there was monopoly telecom regulation and not inter-modal broadband competition like there is today.

Second, consider net neutrality's definition by its primary proponents:

An obviously frustrated Art Brodsky of Public Knowlege, trashes the Nation's leading and successful pilot effort to promote universal broadband in the country -- Connect Kentucky -- in a voluminous post that's best described as a glass-half-empty, life-is-so-terrible-because-the-world-is-not-perfect, whine-fest.  

Bob Atkinson of APT has an excellent rebutal "Disconnected Condemnation" of Art Brodsky's unwarranted and radical attack on the bipartisan "Connect Kentucky" program that is sucessfully promoting broadband to all Kentuckians.

• Mr. Atkinson exposes Mr. Brodsky's piece for what it is partisan "yellow journalism."

Pieces like Mr. Brodsky's show how low net neutrality radicals will go to forward their information commons/net neutrality agenda.

• If they have to step on rural Americans in desperate need of broadband to get what they want, so be it -- nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of a socialized Internet... their end justifies their means... 

Common sense dictates that the FCC will rule in favor of the critical necessity of broadband network management and against the FreePress and Vuze petitions which claim that prioritizing p2p traffic is an unlawful violation of the FCC's network neutrality principles. 

• No one should mistake the FCC doing its job in investigating significant allegations (by issuing public notices for comments), for an FCC predilection against reasonable network management in favor of net neutrality supremacy.

The common sense case why network management trumps net neutrality: