NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Even more on Stanford NN hearing (David P. Reed)
From: David P. Reed [dpreed@reed.com] Subject: Re: [IP] Merccurynews report on Stanford hearing
Since Mr. Bennett was a witness at Harvard, as was I, I have to say that in my service on the FCC Technological Advisory Council (under Chairman Powell) and in my interactions with the government, I choose my arguments carefully, based on the idea that reason and facts, not insults, will carry the day. Bennett seems to think that insults will do better. I disagree. I commend those of you who want to understand Mr. Bennett's views to look at his blog - which is self-explanatory.
________________________________________ From: Richard Bennett [richard@bennett.com] Subject: Re: [IP] George Ford is getting booed and heckled
As predicted:
In neutrality debate, carriers get blamed for Net's weaknessesBy Richard Bennett Article Launched: 04/17/2008 01:35:28 AM PD
I'm afraid Bennett displays a problem common to the current generation of politicians (and to a lesser extent business leaders). He thinks that the mere fact that a court or commission would take the time to even _listen_ to the other side, or ask searching questions, means that the court/commission is prejudiced against his side.
I started to write that this was a disease of NeoConservatives, but in fact I have seen it on all sides of the spectrum -- it was merely more noticeable in Neocons because they had power for a while and were trying to use it to change decades of rulings they considered adverse.
What's more, Martin and the broadband critics have failed to acknowledge an underlying truth about the Internet: It was originally designed for the polite society of network engineering professors and students, not our rough-and-tumble world of large-scale copyright theft and video file-sharing. And it has design defects - bugs - that make it vulnerable to overload and abuse.
Worse yet, Bennett _does_ have a point here. The Internet was designed around many of the same assumptions/goals as the ARPANet, its predecessor. Those assumptions included that the users share the goals of the designers, and that the most important goal is to get the packets through. That attacks, if any, would come from the outside -- damage to the physical structure of the network or the systems attached to it.
It had a concept of security, but it still assumed that the operating system on each host could be trusted to correctly label each packet with its security level (or that the host would connect through a node that _could_ be so trusted).
Hence, it had multiple redundancy, so knocking out a single node would not prevent packets from being sent -- they would just go through a possibly longer/slower route.
That's why our protocols (not just TCP/IP, but SMTP, NNTP, etc.) have little or no defense against forged addresses, malware, and other problems that have plagued us since the Internet went public in 1993, the year of the endless September.
It was never designed to defend itself against:
. forged IP addresses . single-point or distributed Denial of Service attacks . spam . viruses, trojan horses, spyware and other types of malware distributed through email, news, websites, etc. . and, yes, the use of otherwise benign mechanisms (news, email, websites, P2P) to distribute "stolen property" (copyright violations).
This is not to say that Comcast's/Bennett's proposed reaction is a good idea. On the contrary, the insertion of forged packets just makes things worse -- it's one more place where you can't trust that a packet contains what it says it contains. Bennett, while calling attention to the bugs in the Internet's design, attempts to justify Comcast using such a bug for their own purposes.
We _do_ have a problem. At some point, somebody needs to sit down and design a network that is robust in the presence of attacks launched from its own nodes. That would include improved authentication of both IP addresses and backpaths (for mail, news, etc.). The current attempts to deal with the problems remind me of the book _Your Inner Fish_. We are taking a network that is designed for one purpose, using it for a different purpose, and then twisting everything to somehow get it to work in the new way. And it does work, but not very well.