November 2007

Tim Wu, the "father of net neutrality" because he made up the term a few years back, was surprisingly candid in a CNET article that: "the whole net neutrality issue is really about a power struggle."

• Well we now know net neutrality is not about:
  • A supposedly longstanding non-discrimination "principle" of the Internet;
  • all bits being equal; or
  • freedom of speech.
• It's about "power."
  • We knew it all along. 
    • It's really about the "power struggle" over corporate welfare for the dotcom billionaires at Google and eBay who want the consumer to subsidize their piggish bandwith demands in order to maintain their 90% gross profit margins.  

I also found another candid quote by the Moveon.org/FreePress folks that also tells us what they are up to:

The American Antitrust Institute, an independent non-profit advocacy organization just released its white paper:

• "Google Acquisition of DoubleClick: Antitrust Implications" in which it urges the FTC to block the Google-DoubleClick merger as anti-competitive.

Like my Googleopoly analysis from this July and my Senate Judiciary Subcommittee testimony in October, the aai concludes that Google and DoubleClick are indeed direct competitors and that: "the merger presents a relatively straightforward case for challenge under the horizontal and non-horizontal merger guidelines."

• Moreover, the aai stated: "We also see a risk of significant foreclosure effects from Google's control over DoubleClick's publisher and advertiser tools and integration of those tools with Google's dominant search engine and contextual advertising network."

Bottom line: This merger obviously raises serious anti-competitive issues and I continue to believe it should be blocked, but that does not mean that I still think it will be blocked by the FTC -- I no longer do.

I most highly commend George Ou and Richard Bennett for bringing some much-needed adult supervision and technical excellence to the issue of Comcast's network management. Please read George's latest blogpost.

• FreePress...read it and weep -- you have laid another high profile net neutrality egg.

George has produced the must read piece on this issue. In "A rational debate on Comcast's Traffic management" George explains, with the assistance of Richard Bennett's exceptional expertise, what is really going on with Comcast's traffic management. 

• In a nutshell, they explain the real world design limitations of a shared cable network, especially on the upstream path, and how those limitations practically require network managers to limit how much traffic goes through a particular network point, just like traffic lights must do on highway ramps during rush hour to ensure that the highway does not degrade into a parking lot. 

The already low credibility of net neutrality proponents will fall even further as the FCC investigates this allegation and determines Comcast's network management to be well within the bounds of "reasonable." 

• While net neutrality proponents and their activist reporter friends may like to play engineers on TV, noone would want to entrust them with operating anything more complicated than a mouse.   

The reason we have due process in this country is precisely to protect against this type of spurious allegation.

The FreePress Comcast petition alleging that Comcast's network management has violated the FCC's net neutality policy is based on at least four extreme and unreasonable positions by the petitioners.

First, the "pro-neutrality" petitioners are asking the FCC to actively discriminate in favor of the few p2p users at the expense of the vast majority's quality of service. 

• It is extreme and unreasonable to petition that p2p traffic cannot be managed because p2p applications, by design, "efficiency shift."
  • They make downloading more efficient for the few who use the p2p application, by taking away the efficiency of the many by hogging other's bandwidth! 
  • There is nothing neutal at all about p2p!
  • p2p users reach out and consume bandwidth designed for the use of others.  
• In other words, the petitioners have taken the extreme and unreasonable position that p2p users have the unlimited right to consume everyone else's bandwidth even when that usage harms the rights of everyone else. 
  • How is that responsible or rational?

The second extreme and unreasonable position is that the petitioners have proposed fines for Comcast that could total $2.3 trillion! Yes that is a "tr" with that illion.