By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Betanews begins its transition to the new decade with an examination of the critical issues that taught us valuable lessons in the past year. If you're old enough to remember 1999, you may remember the sense of wonder, possibility, and dreams yet to be fulfilled that was drummed up by what used to be called the "media," during the much-celebrated rollover of the odometer. The first decade of the new millennium hit us squarely between the eyes, awakening us to the colder, more tangible reality that before we start cultivating new problems for our descendants to solve, we have to resolve all the old ones we've been sweeping under the rug.
Time Magazine thought the past decade sucked. We were all saddened to hear how disappointed the editors at Time were by the performance of the 2000s, especially when compared to brighter, livelier, more dramatic decades such as the 1940s, 1960s, and that harbinger of great times and cool tunes, the 1060s.
If the 2000s from an historical perspective can be characterized in my personal memory by a single phrase, I think it should be the Decade of Whining -- a decade most appropriately commemorated by the tone at Time. The great voices that defined our society sounded less like Thomas Jefferson, Archibald MacLeish, or Ronald Reagan and more like Andy Rooney, Howard Stern, and Rush Limbaugh -- people wasting time listing the things they hate, without motivating themselves so much as to stand up.
In the absence of anything motivational or inspirational or spiritual -- or, in many cases, factual -- whining rises to the top, becoming a powerful, exploitable force. It conjures just enough public discontent with the status quo to evoke the minimum response in one's favor, without provoking the whiner into undertaking such a revolutionary level of reaction that the cause of the whining itself becomes quashed. Exploiting whining doesn't require much effort -- for example, painting the word "Change" on a billion signs. The response can be compared to a cacophony of babies insisting on a change of diapers, the collective outcry of a populace unequipped to do the job for themselves.
All bits are not created equal
In 2009, the net neutrality debate became a textbook example of harnessing the latent power of whining. In some countries, the question of whether an Internet service provider should have the right to manage data traffic based on the applications for which that data was being used, was elevated to nothing less than a human rights debate, on the order of a citizen's right to speak freely or to vote.
"Civil rights are fundamentally about protecting fairness, equality and freedom for all people. Net Neutrality is about protecting fairness, equality and freedom for all online data," writes SaveTheInternet.com online activist Garlin Gilchrist II. "From a values perspective, these two concepts are functionally equivalent."
The existence of net neutrality as a cause came about as the result of legislation proposed in 2005 by the then-Republican-controlled Congress, that would have created an alternative national licensing system for ISPs. In lieu of tax breaks as incentive for ISPs to choose national over existing municipal licenses (what cable companies such as Comcast and Time Warner must contend with, in every municipality in the US), the Senate considered relaxing regulations for national licensees -- for example, enabling them to build premium tier services for Internet applications they could then resell at a premium. The progress toward passing this legislation was effectively defeated by mostly Democratic opposition who successfully encapsulated the creation of "fast lanes" for potential high-bandwidth customers such as Google, as an issue of promoting unfairness and anti-competitive behavior.
The earliest tangible form of opposition to national licensing came in the form of legislation designed more to solidify the legal concept of net neutrality than to be passed by a floor vote. The latest evolution of that legislation, however, is now actively being considered in Congress for passage as law: HR 3458, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.
Though the bill's provision prohibiting an ISP (such as Comcast) from blocking a user's access to a particular application (such as BitTorrent) receives the most attention, another prominent provision harks back to the root of the whole debate.
"Each Internet access service provider shall have the duty to...not provide or sell to any content, application, or service provider, including any affiliate provider or joint venture, any offering that prioritizes traffic over that of other such providers on an Internet access service," reads the bill's current draft.
The Web happened
The prohibition of any method of premium packet prioritization seems fair if one considers the Internet the way Google has most often characterized it: in short, as the Web by another name. Google proposed a formal regulatory definition for net neutrality to the Federal Communications Commission in June 2007. Citing the co-author of the original TCP/IP Reference Model -- its own Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf -- Google wrote, "The Internet's open, neutral architecture has provided an enormous engine for market innovation, economic growth, social discourse, and the free flow of ideas. The remarkable success of the Internet can be traced to a few simple network principles -- end-to-end design, layered architecture, and open standards -- which together give consumers choice and control over their online activities."
History reveals a very different story. In Andrew S. Tanenbaum's 1996 edition of his famous reference guide, Computer Networks, he compared TCP/IP to the then-recently-defeated OSI model of data interchange:
"The TCP/IP model and protocols have their problems too," Prof. Tanenbaum wrote. "First, the model does not clearly distinguish the concepts of service, interface, and protocol. Good software engineering practice requires differentiating between the specification and the implementation, something that OSI does very carefully, and TCP/IP does not. Consequently, the TCP/IP model is not much of a guide for designing new networks using new technologies.
"Although the IP and TCP protocols were carefully thought out, and well implemented, many of the other protocols were ad hoc, generally produced by a couple of graduate students hacking away until they got tired," the Dutch professor continued later. "The protocol implementations were then distributed free, which resulted in their becoming widely used, deeply entrenched, and thus hard to replace. Some of them are a bit of an embarrassment now."
That was 14 years ago, of course. In an effort to provide some support for the development of applications that were emerging on the Internet at the time, Tanenbaum chronicles the creation of the Internet Society (ISOC) in 1992. That group would define the principal applications of TCP/IP as: e-mail, news (NNTP), remote login (Telnet), and file transfer (FTP), though ISOC would refrain from serving as a governing body. The Web, however, developed despite that definition, as an application unto itself.
While there had been consideration over the mechanisms and methods that could be used to regulate and prioritize traffic -- for example, so that congestion due to FTP didn't drag down e-mail -- the consideration of the social stance of the Internet as an entity is a much later invention. So while Google refers to the "overarching rationale" for the Internet's creation as "the revolutionary intention not to have an uninvited gatekeeper anywhere in the network, but instead to give ordinary end users ultimate control over what to do, where to go, and whom to communicate with," the truth is that the concept of the Internet as a communications medium between individuals, rather than -- as ISOC originally proposed it -- a network of bridges between research organizations and universities, is a relatively recent discovery.
Next: Gaining the most leverage...
Gaining the most leverage
The campaign-ability of net neutrality was most effectively realized in 2008 by a ranking member of then-candidate Barack Obama's transition team named Julius Genachowski, now the chairman of the FCC. In the FCC's notice of proposed rulemaking for net neutrality last October, Chairman Genachowski essentially absorbed Google's definition of the Internet as something designed from the beginning to enable free and open communication over the Web. Credited with the invention of the whole thing were: the US government for TCP/IP, Tim Berners-Lee for HTTP, and Marc Andreessen for Mosaic.
"Another more technical aspect of Internet openness has had the effect of empowering entrepreneurs to innovate without needing to seek permission. TCP/IP reflects a so-called 'end-to-end' system design, in which the routers in the middle of the network are not optimized toward the handling of any particular application, while network endpoints (the user's computer or other communicating device) are expected to perform the functions necessary to support specific networked applications," reads the NPRM (PDF available here). "The practical implication of this design philosophy has been that a software developer can develop new networked applications by writing programs only for end-user computers, without needing to modify the far more specialized programs running on network routing equipment."
History shows that the Internet wasn't so much a product of design as one of happenstance: The net happened. It is the very fact that applications have been written for the Internet without direct concern for how the network can sustain their traffic, that has fueled the entire net neutrality debate this past year. While the issue was born from the debate over national licensing, it transformed into a kind of privacy issue: If Comcast could throttle down your Internet pipeline after booting up a BitTorrent client, something, somewhere, must know that you're using BitTorrent. Which means you must be downloading something really big...and should Comcast know about that?
What's forgotten during that whole debate is the probability that Comcast may prefer not to know about that. If it did have "awareness," if you will, of your online activity, it could become legally responsible for it, and thus a target of lawsuits from rights holders who believe BitTorrent is the harbinger of IP theft.
Casting a skeptical eye on the whole affair from its outset has been FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell. In his partial dissent from the proposed rulemaking last October, Comm. McDowell cited the advanced engineering of Cisco's routers as evidence that the Internet is not, and never was, a dumb pipeline.
"Is the Commission suggesting today that the government draw a bright line of distinction between networks and applications in an effort to justify regulation in this space?" McDowell asked. "If so, should not the Commission refine its view because networks and applications are converging faster than regulators can measure? Otherwise, would the Commission not be favoring one market player over another absent evidence of an abuse of market power? For example, Cisco builds Internet routers that contain over 28.1 million lines of code. How are we to ascertain whether each line of code offers a pure operating system function or some other application that adds value? Should that be the Commission's role? Can we make such determinations efficiently? Do we even have the statutory authority to do any of this?"
McDowell's partial dissent is one of the few statements of reasoned opposition to currently proposed legislation that turns the entire issue of net neutrality -- appropriately -- on its head. Specifically, if the law were to decide that all applications were created equal, wouldn't the prohibition of any type of discrimination by routers and engineering equipment result in a kind of Darwinian virtual battleground, where applications of lesser bandwidth (those that are less equal than others) get pushed out?
Or to put it more directly: Would net neutrality legislation and regulation, as it is currently presented, bring about the very situation it was intended to prevent?
"During the course of this debate, many have confused the important difference between discriminatory conduct and anticompetitive conduct," McDowell goes on. "But the reality is that the Internet can function only if engineers are allowed to discriminate among different types of traffic. The word 'discriminate' carries with it negative connotations, but to network engineers it means 'network management.' Discriminatory conduct, in the network management context, does not necessarily mean anticompetitive conduct. For example, to enjoy online video downloads without interruption or distortion, consumers expect video bits to be given priority over other bits, such as e-mail bits. Such conduct is discriminatory, but not necessarily anticompetitive. If discriminatory conduct were to become anticompetitive conduct, then could it not be addressed in the context of competition and antitrust laws?"
How not to close a sale
In the era before net neutrality regulation was first considered, there were no truly bandwidth-heavy applications -- even HTTP can be rather lightweight. And there were no hot-button applications provoking knee-jerk responses from their practitioners -- FTP, for example, wasn't considered a kind of virtual red-light district the way many paint BitTorrent today.
But as many legitimate BitTorrent users will point out, there's much more to the Internet than the Web. In order for ISPs to continue making investments in building out broadband to do things way beyond the Web, from their vantage point, they would prefer some incentives, a little payback.
Voice-over-IP is a main area of contention. It's a bandwidth-intensive Internet application that's viewed as inherently legitimate, unlike BitTorrent which is often given a negative connotation. ISPs such as Comcast could conceivably afford to build out broadband if they could compete more effectively against Verizon and AT&T for telephone service. For that to happen, VoIP needs to not only become more cost-effective, but more reliably and explicitly managed -- a methodology which, when cast in a more populist light, looks like preferential treatment.
McDowell's scrutiny brings with it the danger that the debate over net neutrality will thoroughly decompose into a reasoned, thoughtful, intellectual discussion over network management practices and engineering principles -- in short, something that won't get hits on Google News. For that reason, most other net neutrality skeptics and opponents have instead resorted to clamoring for the oft-fumbled football of populism: a way to compel citizens to stand on one side or the other, on issues they don't necessarily have to understand.
So net neutrality opponents are attempting to leverage the First Amendment as being threatened by Genachowski's proposed rulemaking. Earlier this month, Kyle McSlarrow, who leads the NCTA -- one of the cable industry's leading advocacy groups -- suggested that by disallowing any kind of special management of VoIP traffic, the US government may not only be threatening the rights of NCTA member companies such as Comcast (assuming the right to offer services falls under "free speech"), but the free speech rights of those who would prefer to communicate with one another using VoIP rather than landline or wireless.
"By its plain terms and history, the First Amendment is a limitation on government power, not an empowerment of government," McSlarrow said.
Then last week, in response to criticism that net neutrality is not a civil rights issue in the way that...say, civil rights was a civil rights issue in the 1960s, the SaveTheInternet.com Coalition suggested that telecommunications companies such as Verizon and AT&T were making investments -- hedge bets, of a sort -- in "national civil rights groups and in communities of color," in hopes of encouraging "the civil rights community" to stand with them in opposition to net neutrality.
"In the wake of a conservative agenda to shrink government and decrease public investment in our communities, there is a long history of investment by telecommunications companies in national civil rights groups and in communities of color. So when companies like Verizon or AT&T frame an issue, they are trusted and believed...In a society marked by media systems that maintain and echo the interests of the dominant group," wrote contributor Malkia Cyril, "it's sound business and political strategy for telecommunications companies to invest in subordinated communities."
The smokescreens from both campaigns effectively mask an old and, to borrow a phrase, inconvenient truth: Any decision on the regulation of Internet traffic, including to disallow some or all regulation of it, constitutes control of that traffic. If it's decided that VoIP and BitTorrent and HTTP are "all created equal" -- to misappropriate those words used more eloquently to refer to people, not apps -- then conceivably the least efficient and most bandwidth-intensive of those apps will always take precedent over the simplest and least complex, perhaps even HTTP itself. And if it's decided instead that certain applications do deserve preferential treatment, then the boundlessness of today's playing field of popular debate indicates that the clamor over which application deserves that preference, will be a bloody free-for-all.
In either instance, applications and their creators and users will compete for bandwidth, space, time, and money. All we're dickering about now are the rules of the fight: Marcus of Queensbury, or cage-match. In no scenario is there an outcome of blissful, functional utopia. There is no net neutrality, due in large part to the fact that the concept wasn't created by engineers, but by politicians.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
![A mid-December timeframe estimate for Firefox releases in 2010. [Courtesy Mozilla]](http://images.betanews.com/media/4232.png)
While the Internet was originally designed as a distributed network of networks that could keep functioning even if entire chunks were blown away by a global thermonuclear exchange, RIM's philosophy is more like the conventional data centers of old, where monolithic machines behind impermeable walls managed all traffic and processing. In doing so, they allowed companies to have maximum control of all consolidated resources because they could manage virtually everything from a single pane of glass. It was simple. As long as everything worked.