The Wall St. Journal wrote this morning that Google has sold out Network Neutrality.
Naturally we trust Murdoch to tell us the truth in all things.
No, wait. We don’t.
As is typical with the Journal, it turns out they’re lying across the board.
The President-elect denies the claim he is backing off NN:
The Obama transition team is reaffirming his complete commitment to net neutrality and is disputing a much-discussed report today claiming that the President-elect is softening his support for it or shifting his position.
Obama transition spokesperson Nick Shapiro told us moments ago that Obama’s position — strong support for net neutrality — hasn’t changed.
Asked if the Obama camp had shifted its stance in any way on net neutrality or softened its commitment to it, Shapiro answered: "No."
Network Neutrality is a fight over the nature of Internet pipes.
The Internet was built on what are called "dumb" pipes, that is, tubes ranging from the modem-sized tubes of some years ago to today’s broadband to tomorrow’s fiber optic cable — small, big, enormous — all of which are based on the same fundamental principle: first come, first served.
The economic wonder of the Internet depends on everyone, world-wide, having absolutely the same equal-opportunity chance of getting to everything else, based on when they entered the system, first come, first served.
If my packets hit a relay junction before yours, I’m going to get the data first. It doesn’t matter if you’re a queen, a king, a president, or a billionaire. The Internet doesn’t know who you are, and can’t be made to care.
Network Neutrality is the fight to keep class-warfare the FUCK out of the Internet.
The people who own the largest pipes — AT&T, Sprint, and so on — believe in their corporate hearts, they should be able to charge more in exchange for different classes of service. More to guarantee your video streams get there without stuttering and breaking up, more to make sure your voice data sounds better than your competitions, more to be certain you can own a category all to yourself because the rates are too damn high for your competition and that’s how we play monopoly.
What can’t be won in the hearts of actual customers, can be won with enough money by simply denying those customers any other choice. Then overcharge the hell out of the newly locked in customers to pay to keep the customers locked in. The people who sell the bandwidth will be happy. The folks locking up the customers will be happy. And even most of the customers will be happy, locked in their snug cocoons of product/advertising slumber.
After all, before the breakup of AT&T, how many customers were truly upset with Ma Bell? Sure, people cursed the phone company; that’s what one did. But everyone got dial tone. Everyone had a phone — black. And when you called, a repair man (yes, a man) was at your home the next day. What’s not to like? Cell phones, answering machines, fax machines, the frigging Internet… what the hell are you talking about?
Let us not confuse NN with caching, with doing stuff to make the Internet’s dumb pipes run faster. It’s fine to take the servers that have the content that gets used the most and stick it in places — the actual physical locations, called "Network Access Points" aka "peering points" — where the Internet physically connects around the country (New York City, LA, Palo Alto, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas) and around the world. That’s smart network management. Everyone from Google to utility companies puts their key servers in the places best suited for them to serve up data. As well as to make sure the data is spread out redundantly.
Google caches and so does everyone else. It’s a "best practice." If Google didn’t, they’d be leaving themselves open to a shareholder’s lawsuit for failing to manage assets properly. Not to mention, searches would be slower.
This entire story is because the Journal has crappy technical writers, and worse, because they’re pushing their politics onto their news page. What do you expect… they’re Republicans. They don’t live in Reality with a capital R. Which is why they support an Internet which would be divided by class.
For grins, let me point out a couple of problems with such a beast. If Channel A is always half a second faster than anyone else, I can arbitrage the hell out of the NYSE, dog racing, video poker, and Halo. Not to mention World of Warcraft, which means I could finally beat my daughters. (This could make the whole thing worth it, actually. Pardon me while I throw over my entire worldview. Just for the chance to win in WOW.) Everyone who depends on real-time results would be forced to delay their results by half a second or more, simply to level the playing field again.
How much fun telemedicine will be when some doctors and technicians are using true real-time and others are on a half second delay. Yeah, that surgery is going to be FUN. "Quick… grab that bleeder…"
We need a smart electric grid, which means bringing true broadband — fiber ideally — to every home in America. Doing so will change the nature of work, education, entertainment, communication, family and friends. It could change everything from banking to the Fourth Ammendment if we’re not paying attention. But all this promise will only work if everyone stays equal. Equal-opportunity means equal for everyone, not some can buy their way to the front of the line.
What we relax about for today at least is this…
President-elect Obama stands strongly with us for Network Neutrality.
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outrageous.
Digg
Net neutrality is essential — for all you write about, and more. It is the backbone of democracy, and the fascists know it. That’s why they want to control it– so they can control us.
One of the things that advanced the Chinese move towards democracy– and broke the back of the old Maoist system– was the fax machine. Remember Tien An Minh square? News of that got out by fax– because the Maoists were too retarded to understand how to control it, or were deluded into thinking that they could maintain their repressive system without controlling faxes. So some enterprising students started using fax machines to tell the rest of the world what was going on. (This was before the Toobz.)
Freedom of the Internet is essentially like Freedom of the Press: What the Toobz are to us, is what a free press was to Thomas Paine and other pamphleteers of the 18th century.
With it, we’ve got a chance. Without it, we got nuthin’.
Bob in HI
We’ll still have pamphlets.
1,857 DAYZ AND THE KILLIN’ GOEZ ON AND ON AND…
Citizen Jesse Wendel and the Firepup Freedom Fighters:
I saw TPM’s posting on this earlier so thanx for the verification and clarification…now what ken Obama do legislatively to lock neutrality in and keep it out of pay for play politics?
KEEP THE FAITH AND PASS THE AMMUNITION, IT’S ALL ABOUT THE STRUGGLE!!!
The article suggested everyone had switched position on neutrality… Yahoo, Google, Microsoft..
The only recent statements I’ve read about Obamas position on internet infrastructure.. seem to include all schools and libraries. I’m wondering if there is a chance at all for real public works for high speed net service to every American home?
Thanks for this post, Jessie.
Have a little chat first with the leadership from the House and Senate then another little chat with both caucuses, separately.
With some guys from Cicero dressed in black suits, black shirts, white ties and black fedoras sprinkled around the room to maintain “unity.” *g*
Could this story be a plant by Google/Obama to test the waters?
“all of which are based on the same fundamental principle: first come, first served”
umm…no. With IPv4 yes. With IPv6 or a ATM backbone, no. Class of Service applies, The technical intent is to give video and voice prooroty over data.
“We need a smart electric grid, which means bringing true broadband — fiber ideally — to every home in America”
This is a confucion of two ideas “electric grid” and “fiber to the home”
electric grid = electricity.
fiber to the home = tv on demand, and internet.
Are you running IPv6?
I didn’t think so.
Yeah, sure, some people do. But almost everyone is still on IP4. And will be for some time to come.
No, I’m not confusing the two.
Leaving aside for a moment that most of the bugs have been worked out of running IP over the grid, what I’m saying is, in order to have a smart electrical grid, part of any such venture will be wiring up people’s homes such that they can see at every instant how they are contributing to the grid, how the power they are generating at their home is adding back into the electrical grid and how it is taking away.
While the grid is one thing and while high-speed Internet is another, we’re going to need both for either to work. It won’t be enough to simply have a grid which can both send power to homes and accept power from homes. We need to have very sophisticated ability for people sitting at home, at work, flying in an airplane, to connect to their home and to the appliances in their homes, the televisions, ovens, and so on, to turn them on and off, up and down. All that requires a level of interconnection and high-speed abilities which right now we don’t have.
We’re going to need fiber to the home. And we’re going to need a new smart electrical grid. We won’t get one without the other.
And even here this is an Apples and Oranges argument.
The issue from a NN viewpoint is not shaping traffic just to allow video and voice to go more cleanly. NN is about not allowing companies to purchase priorities and lock out the competition.
You can do anything you want on your own network, and that’s fine. If you choose to have your VOIP traffic inside your Fortune 500 company — say you’re running CISCO Unity onto Exchange 2007 SP1 riding on top of Windows 2003 SP3, with 50,000 seats in a WAN in five states, 10,000 people per state. NN says nothing about you taking your leased OC48 lines between sites and shaping them however the hell you want. It’s your network; do what you want.
However, if all you have is an OC12 to the Internet and you’re running VPNs between the sites, NN says you get ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENT PRIORITY than anyone else for your traffic between your border router at Site A and your border router at Site B. Everything between is the Internet, baby, and your traffic flows subject to the whim of your ISPs. Obviously you’re going to have multiple ISPs, so BGP is your friend. None the less, it isn’t under your control. That’s the point. Its the PUBLIC Internet. If you want a private network, pay for it.
Ain’t no one saying you can’t buy up all the dark fiber you want. Hell, you can lay it down yourself if your budget can afford it. Or go after old Microwave towers. You can even launch satellites if you wish. But what you can’t do is have any increased priority within the same public internet over anyone else. Not for one type of traffic over another, not for anything. Everyone is equal.
I just want to be clear we’re not arguing technical conversations about IPv4 v IPv6. We’re comparing apples to apples. *smiles*
And stone tablets!!! *G*
Are we still allowed to use semaphores and smoke signals? Do chiefs get priority? What if an ’indian’ wants to signal that we’re about to be attacked, would his message get through? Seems equal is an important concept.