Week 10: Insert Joke About Tubes Here

I was looking at my subscriptions in Google Reader and spotted this from Line25: 40 Amazing Female Role Models for Web Designers. I thought it was pretty cool so I'm sharing. Line25 also posts, among other things, 'Sites of the Week' if you just want to look at pretty designs.

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Network Neutrality

I'm sure by now most people have heard that the FCC is drafting rules on network neutrality. (What's up with all the links to Word docs? Not everyone owns a copy of Microsoft Word. PDFs people! Adobe Acrobat Reader is free!)

The list of what the current proposal would require of Internet Service Providers seems reasonable, to me anyway. As long as everything is legal an ISP can't prevent anyone from sending or receiving data, using services or applications, or connecting to other networks. Nor treat it said items in a discriminatory manner. They can't block anyone from the competition and they'd have to make some of the information regarding their network management public.

I know companies like to keep how they do things secret but that's what they get for having invisible bandwidth caps.

The current Wikipedia article on network neutrality is written as a debate instead of an encyclopedic article. Bad for Wikipedia and not exactly neutral either but still interesting reading. I looked at a couple of the web sites cited by the article and was struck by this:

That scenario [a bifurcated world in which the wealthy enjoy first-class Internet access, while everyone else is left with slow connections and degraded content], however, is a false paradigm. Such an all-or-nothing world doesn't exist today, nor will it exist in the future. Without additional regulation, service providers are likely to continue doing what they are doing. They will continue to offer a variety of broadband service plans at a variety of price points to suit every type of consumer.

This is laughable at best and at worst an incredible insult to the intelligence of anyone reading it. I'm supposed to believe that an ISP would never charge users more for accessing sites like Google and Hulu or degrade services like Skype that compete directly with their own offerings just because it hasn't happened yet? ISPs already want companies like Google to pay them to keep access to their site fast. Why should I believe that they won't also charge customers more for other people's content or that only the sites that can pay the most will be easy for me to get to?

I think the problem is that all the major ISPs are either cable or satellite providers or telecommunications companies. Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, etc. are all used to getting paid at both ends. Both parties have to pay for phone service to make or receive calls. The customer pays for cable or satellite TV and the networks pay money to have their channels carried by the providers.

OK, I've strayed away from 'something I've learned' to 'here's some opinions I already had'. But I did find out from the Wikipedia article that it isn't just ISPs who are against the legislation. While Tim Berners Lee supports network neutrality Robert Kahn does not. That surprised me. People like Bob Kahn believe that they should be able to develop and use technology that does treat different types of data differently and that it will be necessary to improving the Internet. There's a link to an article and a link to a video as sources for that. The article from the Register, unfortunately, doesn't say much about why network neutrality is bad just that it is.

Saying this will prove my professor right in having us do these blog posts, but why doesn't Robert Kahn have a blog?

If anyone knows of any sites with detailed arguments from Robert Kahn or any engineer about why net neutrality is bad feel free to put them in the comments.