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Net neutrality at EFF-Austin

Thursday night, EFF-Austin had a discussion of net neutrality with Internet expert John Quarterman, entrepreneur Michael Hathaway, AT&T VP Hank Hultquist, and author Austin Bay. It was a great conversation, available as a 98mb mp3... long but worth listening. A few points from the talk:

We're concerned about arbitrary bandwidth limits.

We need both a public and a private Internet. The public Internet brings us ubiquitous connectivity; the private Internet brings reliable service. We already have the private Internet (e.g. Akamai), and it doesn't make sense to legislate against it, if that's how net neutrality would be defined. The private Internet is compensated, managed, and provides some assurance of Quality of Service.
Packet network is where all forms of content distribution are moving. It's the most effective way to to deliver on demand voice, text, images, sound, video.

Hultquist: The Internet is really a set of agreements that includes both best effort treatment and, in some cases, will require better than best effort. There's a certain about of fear and uncertainty because no one knows what the network will look like in the future. However Hank believes that potential consumer-harming behavior is quite unlikely.

More video requires more capacity. So far behavior on the Internet has been very bursty, with 50kbps average use. Video means more sustained delivery at high bandwidth.
Broadcasting is not the future. AT&T is moving to packet video.
Hank feels that all the legislative proposals he's seen are "like Jell-O," and that they represent a form of Ludditism.

John Quarterman says that the FCC did away with net neutrality last year by deciding cable was no longer a telecommunications service, was instead an information service. The FCC also decided that broadband is an information service, not telecom. At the same time the FCC publsihed "four principles of net neutrality."

1. Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
2. Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
3. Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network;
4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

The use of the term "consumer" in each of the four principles suggests a broadcast orientation... in the broadcast world you have passive consumption of content, and not the kind of active participation in creating content and value that we see on today's Internet. And there are many other questions one could ask about these four principles. For instance, in #1, what law is used to define lawful content? The Internet is global, covering many jurisdictions. In #2, what are the needs of law enforcement? In #3, who decides what devices are "legal" and whether they harm the network? In #4, where does the competition come from? Can a duopoly (where only phone companies and cable companies provide service) be considered "competitive"?

jon posted this at 10:32 PM
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