Van Schewick’s Alternate History of the Internet
It’s peculiar to me that someone who has spent as much time on Internet policy as Professor van Schewick has internalized so many myths and so few facts. I can only surmise that she has depended on oral histories and personal biographies for her theory of the Internet instead of historical facts.
Balancing the Scales: FCC Will Not Actually Eliminate Net Neutrality
How can we ignore the fact that the Internet of today is nothing like the Internet of the mid ’90s, freshly opened to the public before the web was a cash cow for advertisers?
The Great Social Media Freakout
Senator Al Franken got Silicon Valley’s attention by proposing to apply net neutrality regulations to mega-gatekeepers Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Writing in The Guardian, the senator correctly observed that…
50 Shades of Needless Complexity: Avoiding Policy-Induced Outages
The Internet broke Monday morning. Not for everybody, of course: the outages just hit people who get their Internet service from an ISP that uses Level 3 for backbone service…
Internet Monopoly Platform Crisis
How the tables have turned. At the dawn of the net neutrality debate, the good guys in the Internet marketplace were the scrappy platform startups created in dorm rooms and…
My Reply Comments on Restoring Internet Freedom
Today I filed a critique of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Engineers Letter” with the FCC. The letter, based on a an amicus brief filed in support of the 2015 Open…
Internet Pioneers Discuss Network Architecture and Regulation
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Internet regulation is like the Game of Thrones, a battle between parochial interests that ignores the threat of an innovation-less winter.
Big Picture Issues with EFF Letter
As I pointed out in the last post, the Engineers Letter EFF filed with the FCC in the Internet Freedom docket is riddled with errors. It attacks the Commission’s understanding…
EFF’s Engineers Letter Avoids Key Issues About Internet Regulation
One of the more intriguing comments filed with the FCC in the “Restoring Internet Freedom” docket is a letter lambasting the FCC for failing to understand how the Internet works….
Congestion Pricing for Infrastructure: I Still Don’t Know Why Net Neutrality is Important
When usage, delay tolerance, and loss tolerance are all unknowns, we fall to an unknown level of quality. While this simplifies billing, it doesn’t do justice to the needs of applications, innovation, or investment.
A side effect of switching from the current billing model to a quality-based model is that the unproductive net neutrality debate summarily ends. When users have control over the end-to-end quality of each application transaction, the means used by the provider to deliver the desired quality are unimportant.