NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: "Regulating" the Internet -- and Distinctions -- ATM vs IP
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Decoupling the physical
facilities from the services is the pragmatic and sustainable face of
neutrality. This way we avoid the conflict of interest that I consider the
defining property of today’s telecom. Too bad the FCC is limited to
playing word games as they dance around this problem. I remember watching Bob
Pepper trying to say this within the constraints he faced. Yet there people in
the audience who couldn’t get it and seemed unable to recognize this and
tried to act as if the rules made sense. There is a viable business in
maintaining the transport if we fund it as such. "How robust is ATM"
is a key question. This is why protocols do matter. ATM is good for links but
doesn’t composite well. The genius of the end-to-end argument is in
reducing the role of the network to best-efforts packets thus shifting the
design point from one in which any failure is fatal to one in which anything
path that works is success. This is also the source of
conflict – telecom is all about the path and the Internet is about what
we can do independent of the path. They are very different views of the world
and the source of our problems is in hobbling the benefits of path
independences with all the limitations of path dependence.
We need to decouple the roles
of the IP address as well as the elements of telecom if we are to get the
benefits of neutrality. We can then have a viable business
is installing and maintaining the physical facilities and pay for it directly
rather than having to maintain scarcity in order to fund it out of service
revenue. -----Original Message----- Phil Karn wrote: > What has to happen is
very clear: "telecommunications services" must > be defined as
"physical transmission facilities" and "information > services" as the
applications of those facilities. The former must be > carefully regulated
wherever a market failure has created a > destructive monopoly.
The latter should be left completely alone > because it's vibrant and
diverse, and there's really nothing wrong > with it. > > Under no circumstances
must the telecommunications service providers > be allowed to grab
further control over the information services that > use them. We can count
on them to try. I think you have found the
exact crucial distinction. Much as I hate the idea of
telling the people who built out the physical lines (cables, fiber) that
"we are taking control of your stuff for our benefit", it worked out
not-too-badly in the telco "breakup". So maybe an equivalent thing here: a
requirement that the cablecos rent the use of their lines to other
providers at a price determined to be "fair" by the government. That would allow almost
anybody to get into the ISP business for the cost of a couple of servers
and a few routers, just as you could become a "telephone
company" for a few $1000 in the 1980s & 1990s. Of course, you won't last long unless
you can sell your service for more than the cost of renting (your share
of) the cables plus your own operating costs... Another open question: how
robust is ATM? If we allow random people to declare themselves ISPs and
connect directly into the ATM "backbone", will that create the same
sort of security holes (at a much deeper level) that we currently see
on the Internet, with DNS Spoofing and fake routing tables? |